Embers
by AuraZero
Summary: "She had seen him take a different form though, sometimes, at the end of the day, when the sun was setting and everything was quiet. He had human eyes then and he was tired, the light-blue irises were less cold and his sad gaze was travelling to other places, longing who knows what." Twenty-year-old Nora tries to survive in a terrifying future, with the help of a cynical mercenary.
1. Chapter 1

**Notes:** Apologies for any grammatical/lexical inaccuracies you happen to stumble upon, since English is not my native tongue. I do know good English, but I'll unavoidably make small errors. Any feedback appreciated.  
First chapter describes pre-war Nora, as I have imagined her.  
I'll be posting chapters as soon as I translate them from the original Greek text.

Thanks for reading this :)

* * *

They had found shelter in an old garage and had pulled the iron door shut. It was pouring irradiated rain outside and they couldn't leave.

Nora pressed the button on the side of the pistol, removed the empty magazine, and sloppily slid the full one inside. But she must have done something wrong because the magazine did not click properly and ended up on the floor, all bullets scattered out.

It was a sad sight.

"Again," muttered the mercenary who was seated on the floor, facing her.

"Do it again 'till you learn. And pick up those bullets; what a mess." He was sitting with his head stooped, half his face hidden under the brim of his torn military cap, and was surveying the loot from the Raiders: a box of .308 bullets, three flasks of water, one can pineapple slices (in juice), and two devices that looked like those old asthma inhalers; he told her they were 'Jet' and when she'd asked him what Jet was, he'd said simply, "You're gonna try it."

Nora set to pick up the bullets from the floor, frowning. Loading a pistol wasn't that hard – at least that's what _he_ was always saying, but then again he thought that loading weapons was hard only for stupid people, so she had a good idea what he thought about her, too. She kept loading and unloading the magazine then, trying to do it a little bit faster each time. "Every second you miss loading your gun might cost you your precious little life," that's what he'd told her.

They hadn't eaten since the previous night and, strangely, she had a craving for vanilla milk shake in Mr. Hawthorn's diner. There weren't milk shakes anymore, nor diners for that matter. When was it when she was having a milk shake, sitting on those tall stools next to the bar, and dangling her long legs back and forth, with her white angle socks and light-blue Mary Janes? Might have been when she was in high school.

She had met Nate in that same diner, a day of July, after her college exams, when she had returned to Concord for summer holidays. But on that day she wasn't sitting on a tall stool next to the bar, dangling her bare legs, because she was a college student by then and she had taken a seat on the booths with her friend, Lory. And Lory had said to her, "You know, Nora, a friend of mine is coming along, you know, that guy I met at Sarah's party, and he's bringing his pal, too, and, you know, I'm crazy about him, I mean, I really like him, and I forgot to tell you, they're a bit older, they're soldiers, but they're on their leave now…" and she kept on bubbling, all in one breathless swoop, and Nora laughed because she really liked Lory.

So on that sunny, hot day in July, people were strolling about happily out in the stores, or at least that's how it looked to Nora, because she was happy herself. Now and then, you could hear the news anchor's voice from the TV set that was hanging over the bar, describing the progress of the war in Alaska. "One more victory against the Chinese menace." The odd advert would also come up about those who wanted to go to the war as mercenaries to fight against the 'Red Devils'. Despite all these, Nora felt safe in Boston and her Daddy's business was going well and they weren't so much affected by the oil crisis, at least not to the degree it had stroke the European Commonwealth, whence Nora's family had moved to America when she was still at primary school. So Nora kept drinking her milk shakes at Mr. Hawthorn's diner, almost oblivious to what was happening to the rest of the world. And the rest of the world – because she had to recognize this eventually and face the truth – wasn't doing very well.

It was the summer of 2076. Nora was a second-year law student, at Boston College.

When she was accepted at the school they were all so excited, Mom and Dad and auntie and cousins, everyone except perhaps Nora herself, who had locked herself up in her room after that party for her success, with tears in her eyes, because she wasn't so sure – after all that studying – that her calling in life was to study law at Boston College.

However, and because she was the good kid, the promising one, she put on her usual sweet smile and traveled to Newton to start her college life. 'At least I'm gonna meet boys,' that's what she'd thought.

And then, before she had even started to feel the thrills of the first college kisses, she met Nate at that diner, six years her elder, tall and dark-haired, with a slight sadness in his eyes that made him so attractive to nineteen-year-old Nora. She couldn't imagine that that sadness was coming mostly from what Nate had seen – and probably done – at the Alaskan war, which sometimes brought him nightmares and he would wake up covered in sweat next to her in bed, but back then Nora was somewhat ignorant of his problems, because she was pampered in her spouse's arms just like she was in her father's.

Of course, our relatively pampered Eleanor (because this was her given name) had also problems of her own. In August 2076, she found out that she was pregnant and, half-terrified and half-excited, phoned Nate to tell him, after he had already left for one more semester in Alaska. He finally managed to take his final leave from the army three months later and come back to Nora – when their wedding took place – looking for a job as a computer programmer.

Meanwhile, Nora found herself pregnant and married at her 19, which was a pretty scandalous thing. On the fifth month of her pregnancy she had to quit the school, though this didn't worry her too much, since it was obvious that law didn't really interest her, nor did it go well with her introvert self. She and Nate rented a pretty two-bedroom bungalow at Sanctuary Hills, with the help of her family, who were better-off than Nate, given that the latter hadn't yet found a steady job, though, fortunately, had saved enough money from his army time, and their wedding gift was Codsworth, a brand new Mr. Handy, robo-butler.

During the last few months before her son was born, Nora caught herself pacing up and down in their house, all alone, with only Codsworth to keep her company. She would look absent-mindedly at the idyllic Sanctuary Hills countryside outside the window and, now and then, at her round belly. She felt sad. She felt that everything had gone wrong, but didn't know what to do to make them right. She'd spend her time within a haze of dullness, changing channels on TV and blaming herself, her timidity, and her 'Yes, Daddy'. She'd look at her bloated belly in fear. She'd drink lemonades and sometimes ask Codsworth to tell her a joke.

Meanwhile, the TV was broadcasting the suppression of the angry and famished mobs in California, Texas, and other states, by the soldiers in those power-armors that looked like tanks. Unemployment and inflation had skyrocketed. The company where Nate had, finally, found a job was making mass layoffs and he was afraid that his turn would eventually come, too. Fallout shelters, called 'Vaults', had already been built in various places, one even a few miles away from their own neighborhood, Sanctuary Hills. China, said the anchorman, was preparing a strong nuclear attack after the defeat in Anchorage. But so was America.

Nate's parents' wedding gift, who were practical folks, was a place for the three of them inside the Sanctuary Vault. It had costed them too much and Nate had scolded them and told them it wasn't necessary, but that same night, on their wedding day, lying in bed, he had told her that it wasn't such a bad idea after all. He had placed his hand on her three-month belly and had told her that he wanted a future for their son or daughter and that things were tough and were likely to get tougher. Vault-Tec gave rooms in their shelters to those who paid and also to a few others through a raffle, so they should feel lucky. While he was telling her all these, Nora was thinking about the end of the world with a pleasant excitement.

It was an October morning – Shaun was then 6 months old – and they were getting ready to go to a dinner party for the Alaskan veterans, when their doorbell rang and a salesman came up their door to sell them a set of encyclopedias. The day outside was sunny, they were running late, and Nora was trying to think of something polite to get rid of him as fast as she could. It was at that moment that an emergency broadcast was heard on TV and the anchor kept saying, "this is not an drill" and "head to the nearest shelter, you and your family". The salesman picked up his encyclopedias and hurried away. Nate grabbed Shaun from his crib and started running with all the rest of the neighbors towards the little hill where the Vault was built. Nora had thought then that she wasn't a very good Mom, because it was Nate's first instinct to take their son in his arms and run and not hers. Perhaps she wasn't a very good Mom after all, but now the end of the world was near so it didn't really matter so much.

At the Vault's entrance there were quite a few people gathered, yelling "Let us in!", but there were soldiers there and had formed a line and pushed people away, telling them, "Only those whose name's on the list". And their name _was_ on the list, hers and Shaun's and Nate's, so the soldiers opened the line and let them in, but a neighbor with platinum blond hair was pulling Nora's arm, shouting, "Take me in, take me in", and then Nate grabbed her other arm and dragged her towards him, and the neighbor was left behind and she was crying, shouting still.

When they finally gathered up with a few others on top of the platform with the number 111, which was going to take them down, underground, they were able to see the bombs falling in the distance, for just a few seconds. Then the platform lowered and dived underground, and the surface world faded into darkness.

It was October 23, 2077.


	2. Chapter 2

MacCready watched her lanky figure as she was striding along in front of him, the hunting rifle hanging from her shoulder in such an unacceptable way that if she had to pull it to her front and use it at that particular moment, she would be surely shot dead.

He hastened his pace and came next to her, grabbed her by the shoulder and told her, "Gimme the rifle," "Why?", "'Cause you're carrying it the wrong way and you have to have it like _this_ ," and he turned the sling from the other side, placing it over her left shoulder, "so that you can bring it forward with your strong arm. 'Cause if you don't grab it quickly, _boom_ ," and he brought his hand in front of her face and then pushed her forehead back with his index finger. She stared at him wide-eyed and smiled faintly.

MacCready wondered why she was always smiling when he told her something. He sighed in annoyance and moved forward, giving her space.

'It's pointless,' he thought. He just couldn't get his head around the fact that she had managed to stay alive while crossing the wasteland from that settlement up north, that she told him she came from, to the center of Boston, which was literally a battlefield. 'A walking corpse,' that's how he'd called her in front of Charlie, a little after she had hired him. That's how he used to call all those thumb-suckers who – it was rare, but it did happen – stumbled across his way and who, according to his own judgment, did not stand the slightest chance. And he was right; most of the time.

But the girl had wondrously managed to survive her escape from the Vault and had even – who would have thought – crawled so far as Goodneighbor, where MacCready had his den. It was quite impressive.

That day when she came to find him, he was sitting at the bar, at Third Rail, and was on his fourth beer. He'd told Charlie to put it on his tab because he had nothing to pay him with, and Charlie had called him something obscene and kept wiping glasses with his metallic hand. A guy next to him told him, "There's someone looking for ya," and MacCready stood up and tottered to his private suite and came face to face with the lanky girl, alongside a Mr. Handy and a dog, and the first thing that came to his mind was, 'Who's _so_ stupid to parade a robo-butler inside Goodneighbor?'

She was wearing a dirty trench coat and a blue shirt, brown trousers and boots. Her coat was too big for her and she had rudely fastened it together with a worn-out leather belt, and she'd folded the sleeves up so that her hands could stick out. The brown trousers were torn at one point on the knee, exposing a piece of bruised, white flesh. On the blue shirt, around the abdomen area and mostly hidden by the trench coat, there was a hint of dried blood. Yes, it was pretty obvious that she had snitched the clothes from someone else; someone who wasn't alive anymore. 'But then again, haven't we all?' he thought, and laughed to himself. She had one of those big military hats on her head, the ones with the wide brim all around, letting long strands of light brown hair hanging down. She was stooping a little and her tired eyes looked as though she was ready to cry, or beg, or something equally pathetic.

But something didn't really fit into the picture well, and it was this: she looked fed and she was clean (too clean), had that hovering tin can next to her and, most importantly, she had that oversized fancy watch wrapped around her left wrist, that infamous Pip-Boy, which you could only snatch from some miserable Vault survivor, if you were lucky enough to find one.

Now MacCready had a lot of faults – mostly his cockiness and his addiction to booze – but he had a sharp eye and a keen judgment. And one more thing he noticed, no sooner had the Vault girl – because by that time he was certain that that's where that scared waif had come from – managed to speak a word, was that she was married – or at least had been at some point in her life – because there was a gold wedding ring shining on the third finger of her left hand. Something which took him by surprise because he didn't make her older than sixteen. But this mattered little; what did mater was that voice inside him, telling him, 'Get ready to hit it big, R.J. my boy.' And it was time, because he was totally broke.

The dog wagged his tail happily and scampered all around the room and started sniffing the dirty red couch; he ended up next to MacCready's boot and started sniffing that, too. MacCready pushed him away, gently, with his foot.

"So… How's life on the surface treating you?" he asked her, and lit a cigarette, wearing his suave face, because he didn't want her to get wind of how skint or desperate he was.

She looked at him befuddled, as if she couldn't really understand his language, maybe trying to figure out what had given her away. Finally, she spoke, and told him that she wanted to hire his services so that he could teach her to use weapons.

"What kind of weapons?"  
"Anything really – rifle, pistol, knife…"  
"Planning to kill somebody?"  
"No – it's just that… life's difficult when others want to kill you."  
"Tell me about it."

Well, that was a first for MacCready, having to pretend to be a survival coach, and he found it exceedingly amusing, but wiped it off his mind quickly and told her, "250 caps. No bargains. For three weeks. Then we'll see it how it goes."

It was as clear as day that the girl did not have that kind of amount on her person, and started to rummage in her backpack – probably for the box where she kept the caps, but mostly out of embarrassment – and then she said to him, "Would you take a hundred now and the rest later?"

"This is no charity. Come again when you've collected the 250." He was indeed desperate and skint but a hundred was too low a tariff, even by his standards.

The motley crew of the girl, the floating butler, and the dog, took their leave then, temporarily, and he stood there smoking and eyeing them while they were going up the stairs leading to the exit, the butler muttering something to his mistress, and the dog, oblivious to human worries, hopping merrily up the steps, ahead of them. 'Circus is in town,' he thought.

Unexpectedly, the girl came back only half an hour later, with just the dog accompanying her.

"How does two hundred caps sound to you?" she asked him timidly. Her weary eyes were almost begging him and he realized that if she spent those two hundred, she'd probably have the bare minimum left to get by.

And he was almost tempted to give her the OK – 200 was enough to cover some of his expenses and, after all, he only said 250 so that the clients would start bargaining, although he insisted that the fee was strictly non-negotiable, and other bullshit like this.

But then – was it perhaps greed, his own personal definition of right and wrong, or maybe his envy for someone who had lived the good life? Whatever the reason was, MacCready examined the fed girl and the dog and the Pip-Boy once more, and reckoned, 'And why should I knock off the price for this washed rich kid from the Vaults? No – let her see how real life is, up here, with the filth. Starting with me.'

So he told her, 'Price is 250 – told ya: no bargains.'

The girl got a sour look and lowered her gaze, and then produced a pouch from her backpack and started counting the caps, one by one. 'Ha,' thought MacCready, 'knew she had more somewhere in there.'

"248 is all I have," she muttered and twitched her lips in annoyance.  
"They're fine; hand 'em over."

When she reached out her hand to give him the caps, he noticed that she was no longer wearing her wedding ring.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes:** Apologies for reading what you (almost) already know from the game, but this chapter had to be here; I also had people who haven't played Fallout 4 in mind.  
There is, however, a major deviation. Hope you find it intriguing. :)

Next chapters will focus solely on Mac & his new female friend, with alternate POVs.

* * *

The cryopod's door opened with a loud hiss and Nora collapsed on the floor, crawled on all fours a little farther away, and vomited. Then she curled up in fetal position, trembling and soaked to the bone, and stayed like that for some time. When she finally found the strength to stand up, she staggered towards the cryopod opposite her own, wiped the frosted window with her sleeve, and looked inside. Nate was holding Shaun in his arms and they were sleeping serenely. They were pale, very pale, with smudges of frost here and there.

A woman's metallic voice could be heard from the speakers, repeating over and over again, "Critical error – critical error." Now and then, the voice came out distorted or became completely inaudible. There was a lever next to each cryopod and Nora tried to pull down the one that was next to Nate's, but then another voice was heard from a smaller speaker underneath the lever: "Manual override: denied."

"Shit, shit, shit…"

Nora dragged herself towards a corner where a terminal was attached to the wall. It was covered with a thick layer of dust, which she wiped away with her hands.

'How much time has gone by?'

She randomly pressed different keys on the keyboard and the terminal woke up, crackling intermittently but steadily, and on its screen Nora read the following:

 *****Diagnostics*****

 **Subjects status of Vault: 111**

Cryopod 6: Nicky Seamour. Status: No vital functions detected. Diagnosis: Asphyxia

Cryopod 7: Chadwick Seamour. Status: No vital functions detected. Diagnosis: Asphyxia

Cryopod 8: Anita Neville. Status: No vital functions detected. Diagnosis: Asphyxia

Cryopod 9: Clifford Garland Ottis. Status: No vital functions detected. Diagnosis: Asphyxia

Cryopod 10: Nate Kassabian. Status: No vital functions detected. Diagnosis: Asphyxia  
Shaun Kassabian. Status: No vital functions detected. Diagnosis: Asphyxia

Cryopod 11: Eleanor Andrews. Status: Empty Cryopod

There was a sob forming in her throat, unable to come out, and she felt that she couldn't breathe. She felt her innards twisted into a knot and her legs could barely hold her up. She frantically began pulling that lever next to Nate's cryopod, only to hear the metallic voice denying her the manual override again. The sob finally came out; and it was hard and bitter, and shook her all over. She ran to the neighboring rooms. Every room had six cryopods, three on the right and three on the left side, each one facing the other. And in every room the cryopods were shut tight and there was a dusty terminal where the same words got repeated, again and again: _Status: No vital functions detected._ The metallic voice kept coming off the speakers.

 _Diagnosis: Asphyxia_

Nora crouched slowly down, her back against a cold wall, her face hidden in her hands, and cried silently, rocking back and forth, for quite some time, who knows how long. What was she doing in there, she wondered; she was a cacophony, that's what she was, being alive and warm inside that frozen tomb. She could crawl over to her own cryopod, the only one that was open, and die there quietly, matching the rest of the scenery. Or not. The way things were, she had these two choices. Later in her life, she would find out that in a lot of things choices were simple, and only two: you stay or you go, you speak or you remain silent; you pull the trigger or you die.

And Eleanor didn't want to die. Not yet.

She staggered past the cryopod rooms, opened the heavy round door, dragged herself along the metallic corridor, past the reactor's room and, eventually, she reached that room that they had first seen when the elevator platform had pulled them into the earth, where they were given a blue uniform each, with the number 111. The platform was still waiting there and on it there was a console and next to the console, sprawled on the grey floor, a white uniform wrapped around a skeleton.

'How much time has gone by?'

Around the skeleton's left wrist there was a Personal Information Processor. Nora remembered that leaflet she had received in the post when her parents-in-law had bought them a place in the Vault: 'Upon your arrival into a Vaultec Vault, you are given a RobCo Personal Information Processor (PIP-BOY®). Only the holders of a PIP-BOY® can exit or enter the Vaults.'

She picked the Pip-Boy up, wrapped it around her wrist, pulled out a white cylindrical appendix with the inscription, 'CONNECT TO ENTRY/EXIT CONSOLE', and plugged it into a slot on the console that seemed to have about the same size. She decided to press a big red button right next to the slot and immediately heard the platform screeching and trembling, getting ready to move upwards.

When she finally reached the surface, Nora couldn't quite grasp what she saw. She was expecting an irradiated hell, with blackened ground and dark sky. Instead, she breathed a fresh, cool air and watched the scarce clouds travelling idly on the blue sky. Down the hill where the platform was built, she saw dry, brown grass and grey, skeletal trees standing miserably far away from each other, with no leaves. Scattered here and there, along the street towards her old neighborhood, abandoned trailers, stained with rust and soot, discarded wooden crates, their wood black and rotten now, broken fans, vials with medicine, the remains of a burnt book, a closed suitcase. Remnants of the lives of people who were no longer there. Inside the brown bramble, yellowish bones were sticking out of army uniforms.

His little face looked like he was sleeping. _Diagnosis: Asphyxia._ She broke into tears again.

Some 200 yards away, on a place where the ground went flatter and the trees got scarcer, a light was flickering and that light, she saw later, was a small campfire, and gathered around it were people. She stayed hidden behind a dead tree, hesitant, although, as far as she could tell, there were only four men there, two sitting on the ground around the fire and the other two standing. She wanted to run towards the living and forget about death for a while, but something held her back, their appearance was odd. Three of them were wearing skin-tight black trousers but, though it was a bit chilly, had no clothes on top, only, as far as she could tell, some kind of suspenders or stripes of cloth, along and sideways on their torsos, and some metallic appendices on their shoulders, arms, and knees. One of them seemed to have a colander attached to his chest, but she couldn't be sure. The fourth man was wearing tan long johns with a wide brown belt in the middle and a brown stripe that started from the left side of the belt and ended up on his right shoulder. He was either bald or had his whole head shaven, while the others had a strange mane hanging from just one side of their also shaven heads. Nora thought they looked like a strange native tribe, like those she had once seen in an encyclopedia at her parent's house, half-naked men and women standing in front of their crude hats with sticks in their hands.

At first, Nora thought that those men were holding sticks, too, but, as she approached stealthily a bit closer, she realized that the tribesmen were actually carrying rifles. She took a step to the left and briefly came out of her hiding place behind the tree and the men were alerted to her presence, stood up, and all turned towards her direction. The man with the tan long johns came a few steps closer and Nora realized that it was really a woman, and the stripe on her chest was the sling of a weapon she had on her back. In vain Nora waited for a phrase or a salutation, like people normally do when they see each other. Instead, the woman in the long johns brought her rifle in shooting position, looked through the sight, and shot at her. Nora ducked and jumped to the side, and the bullet, fortunately for her, did not hit her.

She started running frantically then, although her body was still in pain and her legs were weak and trembling and, as she was running, another voice, not the one of her pre-war self, but a new one, the one she had heard for the first time when she was in the Vault, kept going, 'Not yet, not yet'. And as long as she obeyed that voice, she somehow knew she would stay alive.

She finally reached the other side of the lake which was encircling the small community that used to be her home. The tribesmen who wanted to kill her didn't follow. She was out of breath and knelt down on the dry grass, exhausted. Some twenty yards away, near the lake's shore, she made out the figure of a deer, drinking water. But when it detected her presence and turned to face her, Nora realized in terror that it had two heads.

Eventually, she found an abandoned trailer, a little further away, and hid inside. She closed the rusty door tightly. A buzzing flying creature made two or three circles around the trailer and then left her alone. When the sun began to set, she curled up in a corner, wrapped her arms around her knees, and started crying, rocking her body back and forth, back and forth. She stayed there till next morning.

She managed to walk to her old neighborhood, only to find out that there was almost nothing left standing. Well, a few houses still were, but the roofs had been blasted away, the window casings were gaping open, without shutters or windows, and most of the walls had collapsed. The street had cracked open in places and brown weeds were sprouting out of the broken asphalt. The lampposts were bent and rusty, and were standing in awkward positions. Objects that testified to an older life, broken sinks, shattered closets, beat-up chairs, a child's rusty tricycle, were scattered now here and there, among the ruins.

'How much time?'

She cautiously walked along the broken street, peeking through the ruins in case there was still something alive in there, friendly or hostile. But there was nothing. The houses moaned as the soft wind passed through their holes, and cried death and emptiness.

' _No vital functions detected'._

She found her old house and got inside. A part of it was still standing. The bedroom and the wall behind the kitchen were ruined but, oddly, Shaun's little room was preserved somehow. She dragged her fingers along the railing of his wooden crib, which was light blue when they'd bought it. Now it was the light brown of wood, with patches of blue paint here and there. There were a few wooden blocks on the floor, V and A, O and N. 'Please, don't cry again', she thought, but hot tears rolled down her cheek, which she couldn't hold back.

' _Diagnosis: Asphyxia'._

But there was something else there, too, something that hissed and whistled, like a steam cooker, and it was familiar, she knew exactly what it was. She ran to the half-ruined kitchen and he was there, behind the side wall, peeking out hesitantly and then floating towards her, waving his four metallic hands in the air, like drawing elaborate dance moves: Codsworth, the robo-butler. It was hilariously dramatic; her husband and son might have been dead, along with all the rest of the neighbors and all those people who had been imprisoned in that damned Vault, but Codsworth had miraculously survived the blow and was floating there, in front of her. He was a bit rusty, truth be told, and his navigation system wasn't working so well because he occasionally dived down and dragged himself along the floor; his voice box was making screeching sounds and he wasn't able to pronounce words clearly. The first thing that he told her was:

"Mmmmmm…..dam you arrrrr…e late ffff….r llllluuuu….nnnch: two hundrrrrrr…d-and-ten-yearrrrs-one-month-and-ffffff….ive-days."

Nora was gawking at him, dried tears on her cheeks, her blue uniform on, and the Pip-Boy round her wrist. She was very thin and her cheeks had started hollowing. She was tired and hungry, and confused. 'How much _time_ has gone by?'

"What's the date today, Codsworth?" she asked him imperatively.

It was November 10, 2287. She had slept in the cryopod for 210 years.

* * *

Chapter's "end titles" song: Paul McCartney - Momma Miss America: ...watch?v=NXo4MnRgl9k (copy/paste after YouTube URL)


	4. Chapter 4

MacCready dropped down on his right knee and fixed the butt of the sniper rifle against the pocket of his right shoulder, holding the forestock with his left hand. He placed his cheek against the wooden stock of the gun, closing one eye, while the other focused on the target he could see through the scope. He held his breath. He pulled the trigger and the beer bottle, which was 200 yards away, smashed into pieces. Without changing position and resting the barrel of the gun on his left knee, he raised his arm, pulled a bullet from those he had squeezed in the band of his military cap, and skillfully fed it down the gun's magazine. He loaded and targeted the next bottle, which he had placed there himself, a few feet away from the first one. A distant sound of breaking glass was heard.

Boy, were those the good moments, or what? The moments when his attention was only focused on the target and he couldn't hear or see anything else, and his mind was emptied of thoughts. The only other moment when his mind was unclouded like this was when he had too much to drink, which was also good, because when the time came for him to actually produce thoughts, they were unpleasant and he didn't want them. So he always tried either to drink or shoot. And hell, why not? He was really good at both, especially the second!

He'd set up that show with the bottles just to teach the girl the sniper technique, though he wasn't sure when the teaching had stopped and the show-off had started.

"Impressed yet?", he turned and asked her with a smug, lopsided smile; she was standing a little further away and gave him a polite nod, approvingly.

She sure was _too_ polite for the surface world, he thought, and the thought annoyed him. He had spent a few days with her already, rummaging through the debris of the abandoned buildings for supplies, trying to find any small job to buy ammo and guns, and in all their interactions with the rest of the world – wandering traders, the colorful mosaic of Goodneighbor's population – the girl was always giving some sugary replies, nodded compassionately, and smiled – she always smiled – politely. It was something that irked him terribly. She didn't even try to settle a higher reward for the errands that all those loafers kept sending her on, for God's sake! Every time, afterwards, he would lecture her, trying to make her understand that she shouldn't speak like this to those filthy bastards, she shouldn't pity them, or smile at them. He'd told her many a time before that whoever asked her for an errant – especially those well-fed assholes in Diamond City – had more caps than they were willing to pay her, so she had to bargain hard, she had to try to make the highest possible profit. He'd also told her – and he'd pointed this out – that here, contrary to whatever she was used to inside the Vault, here compassion, politeness, and kindness meant stupidity and weakness; people were ungrateful and self-serving, and if she went on like this, those same people would sooner or later trample her down, would rob her and kill her.

The girl listened to him carefully and sometimes they would argue because she insisted that not all people were like this and that, supposedly, some had helped her and stood by her so far, and also that if people worked together in that half-ruined world, instead of killing and robbing each other, they could have a 'mutual benefit'. That's exactly how she'd said it. He'd looked at her puzzled then because, except for the fact that those weird words that he couldn't understand kept always coming out of her mouth, it seemed to him that he was talking to a five-year-old – no, worse still: all the five-year-olds that he'd met had more wisdom than this here girl.

But in general the girl tried to do what he'd told her, she really did, although he often suspected that she changed her attitude when he was present, just to please him, as if she was a school-girl in front of her teacher, and when she was alone she reverted to her old, sugary ways.

Of course, no matter how hard he tried, you could tell that she was different and odd from miles away, and this was even without her wearing that fancy watch around her wrist. Hell, even her accent was weird and when he'd asked her, she had muttered something about her parents having come from another place, 'Yourope' he thought she'd said, and then he thought she was just bullshitting him because how could her parents come from another place since they'd been born inside the Vault and, anyhow, even if we accepted that she was referring to her great-great-great-grandparents, did she really expect him to believe that they'd handed down their damn language, after all those years? But he was tired when she'd told him and he let it pass. He just thought that the girl had no talent in lying, which was also against her.

Truth was that the girl had no talent whatsoever that could help her survive in the Commonwealth. When he'd first met her she couldn't even hold a gun, let alone shoot with one. When he asked her how she managed to come so far as Goodneighbor, she'd told him that she was running and hiding most of the time and when things went sour, the robot and the dog had helped her. And that 'probably' she was lucky. MacCready didn't doubt the latter; after all, he believed a lot in luck– in luck and in caps – because there had been a million times when Lady Luck had smiled on him - and one when she hadn't. But going back to the girl's total lack of talents, she didn't know how to fight or use a gun, she was a lousy shot, she was slow and sloppy, reckless, easily frightened, and naïve. So MacCready felt once more that he was accompanying a small child that had just stepped out in the real world and looked at it wide-eyed, and that he was the father, who had to explain to her what to do and what to say. And it was because of this that he had very early on stopped calling her 'boss' – since she _was_ his boss, after all – and called her 'kid' instead, on account of that naivety she had, but also because of how very young she looked, though when he'd asked her, she told him that she was twenty. He hadn't questioned this, though, because she was quite tall, and he'd also thought that a life without hardship and radiation was likely to make you look younger – or rather, it was the other way around, it was that all of them out there, on the surface, looked older than they really were. And he was thinking scornfully and, to be honest, with a touch of envy, about all those folks in the Vaults and the easy deal they had made for themselves; it sure was swell not needing to be asleep with one eye open in case someone got to you from behind your back.

'Behind your back' were the words that were swirling around mercenary MacCready's head one night when they had found shelter inside a ramshackle house, sitting around a crude campfire, and eating beans out of some pre-war cans they'd been carrying with them. He was sour because he wanted to drink and smoke, and there was neither liquor, nor cigarette around. So when he finished eating, he tossed the empty tin can noisily away, scowled at her, and told her:

"Look here, you gotta start telling me the truth, 'cause the only thing that's come out of your mouth so far is lies and mumblings. And don't bother denying it." And then he added, somewhat more softly, "If we are to travel together, I've got to trust you."

The girl was obviously not expecting this kind of talk and almost gagged while eating her spoonful of beans, looking at him with as if she'd seen a ghost. The dog was sitting a bit further away and was rolling his tongue inside the empty tin can, trying to find something to eat.

"So let's see what we know so far," MacCready said, extending his thumb theatrically to actually count those things he knew. "That you used to live in one of those underground Vaults – I found this out myself and you admitted it, too – and that you've absolutely no idea how to use a gun and you want me to teach you. So far so good, but this tale is full of holes; the first and biggest is how on earth you decided to come out of the Vault without a hint of guns or ammo, or at least an idea of how to survive. I mean, it's not that all those thumbsuckers down there don't have a clue about what's happening here. I've met another one like you before, a rich kid who used to live in a Vault, and, believe me, he _really_ knew his way around. I mean, he was real good with words and with the pistol." MacCready bent slightly forward, squinting at her behind their small fire, pointing the index of his right hand at her face while he talked. "The second is, I'd seen your little gold wedding ring when you hired me, actually, a little _before_ you hired me, and because you don't strike me as the type who steals wedding rings, I want you to tell me, honestly, if you're expecting an angry husband to jump at us any minute now; 'cause if this is it, you can take half your caps and scram. I'm not getting myself into this sh… - these stories, and anyway, I don't wanna sleep looking over my shoulder."

The girl gave him a somber look, bowed her head and fiddled with her spoon inside the half-eaten can for a while, and then looked up and told him:

"I knew we were gonna have this conversation sooner or later; I… You're right."  
"Sure I am," he said smugly.  
"You needn't worry about a husband," she said, with a bitter smile. "He's dead."

'What an ass,' MacCready thought then about himself, but before he had time to murmur an apology, the girl told him, "That's OK, you couldn't have known." She stirred and paused for some time, examining him, and it seemed that she had trouble going on. But she went on.

She asked him then if she could trust him herself, and he told her that yes, she could, but the question was pointless anyway, wasn't it? It wasn't as if she had another choice at that moment.

"I did come out of a Vault, that much is true; but I haven't lived inside at all. I mean, they put us all in cryopods as soon as we entered. I woke up about a month ago. I woke up after 210 years. I'm the only survivor – all the rest are dead."

MacCready found it particularly hard to say something to this breathless confession. He just sat there stock-still, staring at her with his mouth half-open, trying to grasp what she'd just told him, repeating her answer word-by-word inside his head. His arms were outstretched, elbows resting on his knees, the fork with which he had eaten the beans was hanging lifelessly from one hand. "You don't say…," he said in the end, dumbfounded.

And then:  
"You mean to tell me that you saw the Great War? You saw the big boom?"  
"Yeah, I mean, a little. We saw the glare of the explosion as the elevator was carrying us underground."

The night outside their makeshift camp was quiet and only the branches of the dead trees could be heard creaking in the soft wind. And, now and then, a wild dog howling.

The questions that followed were expected by the girl and she was answering them with patient politeness. MacCready was feverish now with the excitement of the new revelation, he wanted to ask her how the streets with the cars looked like in the old world (since only carcasses of cars could be seen now, scattered here and there over the cracked asphalt), how the cities were, what kind of jobs the people did, and if they made a lot of caps.

"You know," smiled the girl, "we didn't used to use Nuka-Cola caps for money – this is a post-war novelty."  
"Yeah, I forgot, you used that paper money that we stuff mattresses with," he answered with a mocking grin.

Not that MacCready didn't have an idea about what the world looked like before the big explosion, from the bits and pieces of information he had found here and there in the post-war world, pre-war holotapes, half-burnt books, photos, and, of course, all the kinds of preserved junk that were scattered among the ruins like miserable corpses. But he didn't really have the chance to talk to a live relic every day!

From the girl's answers, the one he liked best was when he asked her what she thought about the world she'd woken up in and she'd said, more or less, that it was ridiculous and shitty. Well, she hadn't really used those exact words, she had blurted out one of those weird ones she liked to use – she wasn't doing it for show-off, he understood that now – and then she explained it, in his language, but anyway, that's what she wanted to say, maybe trying to put it more elegantly. He felt immense satisfaction that whether it was those snub douches in Diamond City, or the filthy scum of Goodneighbor, it was all one and the same for the girl; a disgusting squalor. He was pleased because that was exactly what he believed himself; he was a pragmatist and a pessimist, and saw the world exactly like it was, without illusions. 'Let those morons at Diamond City hear this now; 'Jewel of the Commonwealth' my ass.'

Time had passed though, and the girl announced with weary eyes that she needed some sleep, so he decided to leave her at peace – they'd have time to discuss his questions about the old world later. She climbed up a worn-out couch that was in the room and after a while fell asleep. The dog curled up on the floor, under her feet, and stayed put, like this. MacCready decided to keep watch for some time and then he'd also take a sitting nap down on the wooden floor. He was used to it after all.

Now that the girl had fallen asleep, her face towards him, curled up on the couch with her two palms tacked under her cheek, serving as a pillow, he stayed there awhile, looking thoughtfully at her. It was hard to take in the things she'd told him and even harder to make up his mind as to what to do. He took off his cap briefly and ran his fingers through his hair, and then he rubbed his eyes, stood up, and went to sit by the window. He cursed his luck one more time for letting him run out of cigarettes and turned to look once more at the girl, who had fallen deeply into sleep now.

He felt an immense responsibility weighing down on him then. In his 23 years on that world, never once had he ever heard about someone who'd come back, all alive and kicking and unspoiled, from the past. It was almost inconceivable, a traveler through time. And this meant that if the girl's secret was ever to be discovered – and it _would_ be discovered, sooner or later – she would become one of the most precious commodities of the Commonwealth. And then everyone, for different reasons, would want to cut a piece out of her. And he had to stand there, between her and the world, to make sure they didn't tear her apart.

The thought of leaving the caps behind – not all, he'd keep his small share – and fleeing stealthily into the night briefly crossed his mind. She'd made it nicely so far, she would find someone else. He quickly felt bad about those thoughts and reckoned that if she didn't manage to survive, something wonderful would get lost – a living memory of a bright past. If _he_ didn't protect her, then who?

After all, the truth was that he didn't want to go back to the Third Rail and start spending his caps in booze and idleness, with no one to work for. The truth was that he didn't have anything better to do. But it wasn't only this. Now that he'd found out who she really was, he liked it that the girl had chosen him to help her – he liked the idea of strolling around the squalid streets of Goodneighbor with her by his side, all of them seeing how different she was, and, most of all, that she was with him, MacCready, and no one else.

He was resting now against the wooden casing of the window with one shoulder, examining her, her ribs going up and down rhythmically, following her breathing. She wasn't something spectacular to look at (like his wife, Lucy, was, with her blue eyes and her pretty face), but she had something fine about her and, he admitted, a brightness in her smile which, as much as he was pestering her for using it in the wrong moments and to the wrong people, it made him feel joyfully carefree, a feeling buried deep inside him, drowned by the cynicism, the melancholy, and the bitterness, something that reminded him of those years when he was a kid, together with all those other kids, his friends, away from grown-ups and their filth.

He had found once, when he was 16 and he had to survive on his own through the Wasteland, his rifle and his shrewdness his only companions, some half-ruined pre-war magazines with semi-nude girls, and he had spent some time peering at them, all juicy curves and white, clean skins, and shiny hair, covered in grime, sure, like everything else, but still the most impressive things he'd ever seen compared to the miserable, unwashed people around him. So if someone was to tell him right there and then that some time, in his future life, he was destined to meet a pre-war woman, that would be the picture that MacCready would have in mind, as if all pre-war women had to look like those half-dressed sex bombs in the magazines. It was a good thing then that he didn't have such expectations from the start, because the girl was poles apart from the pretty ones in the pre-war rags – her hair was hanging straight and uncombed, she was thin, and her breasts were almost invisible. MacCready chuckled at his own thoughts, shaking his head.

But then a sadness came over him, his eyes still on the girl, and wondered why. Was it maybe that he had finally discovered that her life wasn't all rosy as he'd imagined at first? He had judged her harshly, that much was true, and he felt bad that he had made her sacrifice that little, precious memory from her old life, the one she was wearing on her finger, to pay him. The girl had also lost someone she loved and not only this, she'd lost her whole world, her life, and had landed roughly on this one, which probably looked like hell compared to whatever she'd left behind.

But this wasn't what had brought out the sadness, not her misery, which wasn't bigger nor smaller than anyone else's out there – it was something else. It was the sum of her looks, her politeness and her foolishness, her ignorance and her smiles, all those things that made her into what she was. It was something that he'd last seen only in the eyes of his son, just before he left him and went away. It was her innocence.

That's what MacCready thought, pacing silently up and down, on the dusty wooden floor, with his arms folded against his chest.

He looked at her face, still relatively white and clean, but a little more tired, a little bonier since he'd first seen her. Her delicate hands, now grimy from dust and unwashedness, still not calloused nor marked by the fights and the hardship yet. Her borrowed clothes, which day by day would become a tear shabbier, a splash of mud dirtier. He knew that the price of this unforgiving irradiated world would be too harsh for the girl: her face would be grubby with dirt and sweat and blood, her white teeth would go black and fall off, her hands would be covered in scratches and knots, her cheeks would sank in deeper and deeper each day. She had never stolen, but she would have to steal, she had never lied, but she would have to lie – she had never killed, but she would have to kill. In the end, the mill of this ruthless world would grind her and make her like everyone else; like himself. Wasn't that what he was teaching her all along? How to look like him?

That's why, he thought, wiping his eyes with the palm of his hand, he should stay with her. Not because of her unbelievable story, not because of the place – or rather the time – which she came from, not even because of her suffering and her pain. He had to stay with her because he had to keep alive the last, perhaps, innocence left in the world, which was reduced to this young girl, sleeping in front of him.

"So, _that's_ what you think you are? The protector of innocence?" scoffed that voice inside him, which he heard when he was sober and was left alone with his thoughts, that voice which was another MacCready, but still the same, someone whom he wanted to forget and kill, but he couldn't. It was the MacCready who had become the leader of those kids, with a rifle behind his back, barely ten years old, the one who had thrown the stone to the old man and had taken all his caps and his water, the one who had helped him stay alive in the Wastes and then the Commonwealth, the one who made him kill and steal when he was with the Gunners, the one who was cynical and ruthless.

"You, who couldn't save even your own family? Weren't they innocent? Wasn't that other girl innocent, the one who begged you to help her – who knows why _you_ in particular – but you had already stained your hands with the blood of her folk, whom you had slaughtered with the Gunners and then set their house on fire and burned it, with the dead ones inside? Do you still hear the screams of the girl, when Finch and Crass were dragging her in those tents, where several other girls had passed, from time to time? Do you remember _her_?"

'Shut up. Stop.'  
"Or maybe it had crossed your own mind, MacCready, to go into those tents, after the blood and the slaughter? Ha, ha, ha…."  
'Shut the fuck up! It _never_ crossed my mind – you hear me? Never!'  
"So please, do me a favor and quit pretending to be the protector of innocence; 'cause it's late, MacCready. It's way too late…"

MacCready stepped out now, into the night. He wanted to make the voice stop and found the dry bark of a tree and hit it with his fist, and then again and again, until his knuckles were torn and bloody, and then he slid down to the ground, numb, his back rubbing against the tree. The voice stopped. And the pain was good, because it made him not think, and not remember.

* * *

Chapter's 'end titles' song: Richard Hawley - Which Way == .../watch?v=EtI9ibk9gpU (copy-paste after entering YouTube's URL)


	5. Chapter 5

**Note:** "Mutants" in the text does not refer to super-mutants.

* * *

She woke up all sweaty, saw the ancient fan turning around slowly above, on the crumbling ceiling, and remembered where she was. She'd dreamt about Shaun; she was in a dark building with metallic corridors, almost like the Vault, and she could hear Shaun crying, and was trying to reach him. She finally found him in the arms of a woman in a white doctor's uniform, but she was running fast ahead of her and, whenever she was about to grab her by the shoulder, she managed to slip away and turn to another dark corridor. Shaun kept crying and she was yelling 'Shaun, don't cry, son! I'm coming, I'm coming!' But it was as if she was wading through water, her feet were all stuck and heavy, and when she looked down, she saw that they were plunged deep into a thick layer of snow.

She got up slowly and sat up on the bed, still hazy and stiff from sleep, and felt the swollen skin on her forehead with her fingers, where the stiches were. She looked around. Hotel Rexford. Maybe she could remember it vaguely, if she tried too hard, but wasn't sure; they didn't use to travel to downtown Boston very often, back in her days, but she surely had seen the area at least once, which was now called 'Goodneighbor' – God knows why, there was nothing good about it. Now the hotel was still operational, whatever was left of it anyway, and provided rooms of questionable quality for 10 caps per day. The room that she had rented was on the second floor; that was as far as it went, the other floors had collapsed ages ago. There was an antique, battered bed frame inside the room, on top of which some dirty mattresses were sloppily thrown – no sign of bedsheets or pillows, and maybe it was better that way – and a few pre-war furniture lying miserably here and there: a lopsided dresser, standing on three legs only, a wooden coffee table upon which rested an ashtray with three butts and one empty beer bottle, a shabby three-seat couch whose one cushion was missing and the rusty springs were sticking out. The door – like all the doors in that hotel – could not be locked, so she and MacCready had pushed the wretched dresser against it in an improvised effort to secure it, mostly because she was worried lest someone crept into the room at night. "And take us what? Two cut cigarettes and a bottle of Nuka Cola?" scoffed MacCready, "And after all, you needn't be scared when I'm around," he blustered playfully, giving her a mock over-confident look. But probably there was an upset look over her, so he decided to do as she wanted.

Now he was sleeping on his back on the tattered couch, legs crossed, one arm over his eyes and the other curled around his rifle, which he had crammed between himself and that farcical imitation of a bed. His boots were resting on the rusty springs, but he didn't seem to particularly mind. Wrapped around his right hand there was the bandage from the wound of the previous day, and it was stained brown-red with blood.

Nora thought that she had never seen him not in direct contact with his rifle, in one way or another. The man was a killer, there was no doubt about it. She had seen it in his eyes, milliseconds just before he pulled the trigger, and on his gaze, which became the gaze of the predator before it leapt on its pray, on the veins of his hands which got tense and swollen before the final blow, on his breath which stalled in a moment of absolute concentration. Did he enjoy it? No, it was necessity, she had finally decided, and then it had become a habit. He'd said once that he would kill for a drink and then he'd added, "Come to think of it, I have." She tried to figure out if he was serious or was just spouting his usual witticisms, and he had laughed with her baffled look and told her, "Don't you worry, kid. I've never killed anyone that didn't deserve it." But how could anyone deserve to die? "How?" he snapped at her then, "You haven't got a clue, have you? Oh, there are plenty scumbags who deserve to die out there – human trash. I've never killed an innocent." And then, as if he wanted to confess something to her, for reasons yet unknown, he added, "That's why I left the Gunners. They were animals – they killed what and whoever crossed their way." His predator eyes got darker, he stooped his head, and moved on, ahead of her. He looked as if he had remembered something that he shouldn't have, so Nora followed his trail without speaking, her eyes fixed on the sniper rifle that he was religiously carrying around. In his mercenary jobs he mostly worked as a sniper, he'd told her. He could manage close-range, but preferred not to risk it.

She contemplated on the dream again, only to feel that knot in her heart and a longing to put her arms around the baby's warm skin, touch his soft cheek, and smell him. Wasn't it so ironic that when she was pregnant, but afterwards, too, she had mixed feelings about the boy? Not that she didn't feel love or tenderness, but looking after him filled her with anxiety and distress, and many times she had caught herself wishing there was someone else to lift the burden of his care from her, so that she could do the things she really wanted, though unsure of what exactly those things were. Now she wanted desperately to hold that kid in her arms for one more time; but of course, she couldn't. And that thought, in all its finality, made her drown in a sea of regret, thinking that if she had him in her arms back then, if she had been the first to pick him up from his crib and run – if she had acted like every good mother would, he would now be alive. MacCready only knew about Nate and the cryopods, so it was her that the thought of the child was dragging down, and her alone, spinning around her head when everything was quiet and she didn't have to run or hide, or find food and water. She could've told him that night in the abandoned house, but she wasn't sure what good it'd do to her – their paths would drift apart soon enough, and she would be alone again. It satisfied her that he had heard her two-hundred-year cryostasis story and didn't run off, and she silently thanked him for that. Despite their arguments and his constant nagging (she knew she annoyed him), he'd been really square with her so far. He was, in truth, her only friend – albeit a paid one. He and the dog.

She stood up and tiptoed towards the couch, reaching her hand to touch the mercenary's shoulder but, while her palm was hovering a few inches over him, he suddenly turned his head towards her, opened his eyes, and sat up swiftly. He was always ready to wake up. "Is it time to go already? Fu… Damn, I was having a nice dream," he said and let out a smiling yawn. Nora had a few seconds time to glance at his teeth before he closed his mouth. They were dirty, with black stains, and he was missing two of the front ones. But she turned her eyes elsewhere so that he wouldn't notice.

"I really need a drink right now," he mumbled, still sitting on the couch, trying to adapt to the dim light that was intruding from the cracks on the window shutters, and to waking itself.  
"But, it's still morning!" Nora exclaimed, surprise all over her face.  
"Well, _that's_ why I wanna drink – to wake up…" he told her, winking at her playfully. Nora frowned and looked down, and told him, "We must find that Valentine guy. We can't put this off any longer…"  
"Yeah, yeah, don't worry – today's the day. I'll just have one beer at Charlie's and then we'll set off – it's helping me shoot straight! We OK, kid?"

He had now acquired the habit of calling her 'kid' for some reason, and had given up on 'boss', which was the first name he called her, although she'd told him her age. It was a bit paternalistic, it was true, but Nora didn't mind so much because it reminded her of her old life; it was a familiar place she'd been before. It was almost convenient – she was a kid in the old world, and remained a kid in the new. One thing was certain though; he had never called her with her own name. Now that she was thinking about it, he didn't even know it, hadn't even asked. MacCready didn't care about names – he cared about caps and who his next target would be.

So they found themselves in that underground bar they called The Third Rail and was, in fact, the entrance of an old metro station that used to be there, now empty from trains and passengers, with debris blocking either side of the rails. At that time the bar was empty from customers as well, except the robo-barman and that woman who was singing there at nights and who, thought Nora, might also be sleeping down there, somewhere. MacCready sat next to her at the bar and told her, "How's it going, beautiful?" and Nora felt a sting inside her chest. She felt small and unimportant, and sore that she'd only earned the title of the 'kid'. She sat on the stool next to MacCready, who had now turned his back to her, pulled out a pouch from her backpack and counted the few caps that she'd scavenged on her outings to the Commonwealth – they couldn't even buy her a bottle of purified water. MacCready, reading her mind, ordered a beer for himself and pushed a Nuka Cola towards her – with her own caps, after all – and went on to fool around with the singer, who was also holding a glass with liquor in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Nora found it unsettling that that woman seemed to have an endless supply of smokes, booze, and clean clothes. 'Who knows where she found them, or what she did to have them gifted to her,' she thought bitterly. She watched her place her painted lips around the cigarette's end, inhale deeply, and let out the smoke lasciviously, like the divas in the movies Nora used to watch back in her time. 'What a character!'

Well, all the people in this future stroke her as odd characters anyway, MacCready included. She had never seen him take off that leather duster he was always wearing, which was decorated with countless scratches and tears, as if it had survived two nuclear wars. One sleeve was gone, so MacCready – or someone else – had sewn a cotton sleeve over there, from another garment. The lower part of the duster was completely tattered too, and the only way for him to fasten it, since most of the fabric was missing, was to wrap a wide leather belt around it, along with a strap, from which a small pair of binoculars was hanging. On his trousers, around his left thigh, he had tied a bandolier with bullets for his rifle, and had three more bullets attached to his military cap, 'so that I don't waste time looking for them,' that's what he'd said. His hand, clutching the beer bottle right next to her, was thin and veiny, grubby skin and blackened nails, unwashed for an indeterminately long time. Nora thought that he had been baptized in the dust and mud of the new world and had now become its worthy child.

He was still a predator, of course, even there, in that forgotten bar, but not the kind that curls up to pounce on its victim; rather, he looked like a cat that enjoys the warmth of the sun. She had seen him take a different form though, sometimes, at the end of the day, when the sun was setting and everything was quiet. He had human eyes then and he was tired, the light-blue irises were less cold and his sad gaze was travelling to other places, longing who knows what.

One day they had entered an old comic book store to find an object that was valuable for one of the citizens in Goodbeighbor, and he would pay them well, and then Nora was able to notice the contradictions that made him who he was. The store was full of dust and junk, and on the crumbling shelves there were only the black cinders of the few magazines that were standing once there, and as soon as you touched them they fell apart, their ashes floating softly with the dust among the few rays of sunlight that came through the sealed windows. As she was rummaging through the dusted relics, Nora heard the man behind her exclaim, "Gorgnak and the Fatherless Cur!" She turned her head to find him triumphantly holding a preserved copy of 'Gorgnak the Barbarian'. The colors had faded a bit and it was torn around the edges, but it was an absolutely decent copy in all other respects. Nora knew this comic. She had seen it being sold thick and fast in convenience stores, all the kids used to be crazy about the blond-maned warrior.

So, what MacCready thought was sane to do at that particular moment was to plant himself on a half-broken chair with no back and start flipping through the comic. Nora laughed. He turned and looked at her grinning, giddy with enthusiasm, held one arm up and waved the magazine at her, saying, "You know what this is? Man, I love comics! I used to collect those, when I was a kid."

He had become a boy.

"How old are you again?" she asked him, mostly to tease him than learn his age, because she supposed she'd already guessed this correctly.  
"Twenty-three," he said under his breath, consumed now with the first pages of the story, not able to discern the question's rhetorical tone.

His face was scrawny and tanned and around his eyes there were tiny, thin lines and, when he wasn't his usual predatory self, his look was often tired, as if he was carrying the weight of a full life, and due to all these, and the teeth, too, Nora didn't make him younger than thirty. Turned out he was only three years older than her – who would have thought?

She had now finished drinking her Nuka Cola and checked the time on the Pip-Boy around her wrist. It was nine and eight in the morning. Or it probably was, she wasn't sure what the correct time was anyway, because she hadn't found any working clocks in the Commonwealth. There were alarm clocks scattered around the ruins and the settlements, but their role was strictly decorative – just like that watch around her companion's wrist. So Nora had just set the time based on the sunrise.

There were a lot of objects that were mere decorations in the new world, dusty antiques which reminded people that life was once very different. The few people who had survived were inevitably living amidst the ruins of the past. Some literally lived inside the run-down houses, sat on the broken chairs, and slept on the threadbare couches. A few objects that had no practical use were scrapped for useful materials, like wood, or screws, or metal, and people tried to build, tried to grow vegetables and fruit on the sickly ground, they tried to keep the feeble spark of hope alive – like ants that have fallen into a deep, dark pit of despair, and still try to follow their preordained paths. Nora had seen it, when they went past some ramshackle farms and soot-stained warehouses with broken windows. When people took notice of them, they came out of their aged houses and stared at them, because it was uncommon to see travelers, and because Nora still had the lustrous look of the old world upon her and, though she didn't really notice back then, this made people gaze at her with wonder and with sadness and, sometimes, with envy. They were often found standing at the edge of the street, usually a man and a woman, sometimes a child, too, looking like dirty scarecrows, gaunt and tired, in tattered, mismatched clothes, sick by the hardships and the contaminated water.

There were several such settlements, scattered all over former Boston, which now had been given the generic name 'Commonwealth', but the two biggest ones were located at the center of the former capital, and they were the so-called 'Diamond City' and 'Goodneighbor' a few blocks further down. Now, Diamond City was just the old baseball field that used to be there, and Nora had laughed when she'd first heard the name they had given it. The people who now inhabited it didn't know what the structure was used for before, nor what stadium or baseball meant – and they didn't care to know. They had found protection behind the huge wall that was encircling the field, which had oddly remained intact after the bombs fell, and felt safe. Inside the structure there were now shacks made of wood and metal that were used as homesteads, traders, a doctor, an impromptu school inside an old school bus, even guards who had found some old player uniforms and were using them as bullet-proof vests.

Nora had quickly found out that except the poor imitation of social structure, Diamond City's dwellers had also maintained a kind of bigotry that no longer had a place in that half-ruined world. So the more privileged members lived on the upper stands, while the poor toilers strived to make a living at the shantytown on the lower field. A few years before Nora escaped from her frozen prison, the people who were considered criminal elements for the pure Diamond City inhabitants were exiled and had built their own settlement near the historical Old State House of Massachusetts, which they called 'Goodneighbor'. And Goodneighbor welcomed all those who were deemed abominations and offensive for the 'Green Jewel of the Commonwealth' – the outcasts, the marginalized, the thugs, the misfits, the deformed, and the mutants.

For Nora all these seemed nonsensical, to say the least, because both settlements looked like filthy slums, hardly having any kind of difference between them, ridiculous copies of the old world in a desperate effort of the people to rebuild their lives upon debris and death. That's what she'd said when MacCready had asked her what she thought about all these, 'a parody of the old world' she'd told him, but the words she was using were foreign to him and she often had to dumb them down. So she told him that she wasn't used to seeing places and buildings she knew before the war in their current wretched state, and that she found the way people were using them now amusing – who would have thought that the metro at Scollay Square would turn into a bar or that the locker rooms of the Fenway would become a hostel? Not that she blamed them, no, no. But if this was the hilarious part, it was at least preposterous that people who shared a common miserable fate would still discriminate against each other – what exactly did it mean to be privileged when you ate from pre-war cans and drank dirty water? And what could anyone say about Nuka Cola caps that had evolved into the most precious commodity of the new world? As much as MacCready explained to her that the pre-war soda was found in such an abundance that the survivors found it more logical to exchange caps than old banknotes, she still wasn't able to grasp it.

That's what she'd told him then and for a minute she was afraid she had offended him, because, after all, he too was a child of the new world that she'd called funny, and absurd, and ratty. But he just cast his eyes down and chuckled, obviously pleased from all those she'd said. And she drank his acceptance with relief, because it was something rare.

Truth was, he was almost never pleased with her actions, and when that happened, his feline eyes would get narrower and an annoyed huff would usually burst out of his mouth, and he'd tell her something crude, either for her sloppy shooting, or for the way she was carrying her rifle, or the way she was talking to the people who crossed their way. Once, when they were in Diamond City, an elderly repairman had found them and he'd asked her to bring him one or two cans with paint, if she came across any, from a nearby abandoned hardware store, outside the wall. People usually did this, asking them for things, because they had guns and they were travelling, whereas all the rest of them were sitting meekly behind their walls or inside their shacks, or anything that offered them an illusion of safety. The things they asked for were usually food or water, or scrap metal, but now and then people would ask for random objects as well, of seemingly little value – a magazine that wasn't completely burnt, a pre-war dress, a framed picture. Nora could see the desperate hope in people's eyes when they were pleading with her and understood that one of the very few luxuries they were left with was to browse the pages of a half-burnt book or paint the faded wall of their stadium, anything that could remind them that they were still alive somehow. How could she deny them this? The elderly repairman said that he'd pay her some caps and she had accepted, but then she turned and saw the mercenary's cold eye and knew that nothing good would come out of his mouth.

"How can you be so naïve?" he rasped, grabbing her by the arm and dragging her a few feet away, so that the old man wouldn't hear.  
"Is it your plan to waste my time and yours too, and risk our heads – 'cause who knows what's lurking inside that damn shop – just so you can bring some paint to this old coot here? And for what? So that these smug pricks can boast that they've painted their fuc… - their wall?"

Nora muttered something, but the man's tight grip made her falter. She wanted to tell him to stop talking to her like that, and that she was the boss and took decisions out here, but the predator's eyes stared at her wildly and the words wouldn't come to her mouth.

"And I've told you to bargain with these morons, because they have more caps than what they promise."

Everything was caps for MacCready.

Occasionally she would listen to him, or rather, she was mostly seeking his acceptance for some unknown reason, and she would make clumsy efforts at squeezing more caps out of people. Sometimes it worked, some others it didn't. But she always felt bad afterwards – how could she possibly ask these ragged souls for more? Did money – caps, dollars, whatever – really matter anymore?

And now she could feel his grasp on her arm again, gentler this time, and saw the blue feline eyes peering at her, cold and arrogant and street-smart, before she was able to actually hear what he was telling her.

"Hey spaceman, coming down to Earth soon?" he asked her, with a lopsided smile. "I said: What's – your – name? Magnolia here is dying to meet you."  
"Nora. My name is Nora…"

* * *

Chapter's "end-titles" song: ELO - Another Heart Breaks == ... /watch?v=VadInV7KS7U (add this after YouTube's URL)


	6. Chapter 6

"Wanna make a trip to your memories? You won't find another trip like this, girl," a sleazy guy with a crooked nose and red-stained eyes from the Jet had told her, grabbing her by the arm. He looked like a lizard.

MacCready had pushed him down on the ground then and told him, "Get lost, creep." He, still dazed from the push, started coughing and spitting phlegm, his eyes set down.

But the girl glared at him and he knew exactly what she'd tell him. 'This wasn't necessary; you didn't have to do this.' Well, she didn't say it in the end, but he knew that this was on her mind and on the tip of her tongue, and her angry look was telling him anyway.

She squatted and placed her face close to the lizard, who was still sitting on the dirt, and asked him, "What exactly are you selling?"

'Here we go…,' he thought and knew that this wasn't gonna end well, but what else could he do? It was her caps after all.

"The best trip, girl – cough, cough – the best! Forget about Jet and Psycho; this is the best."

He produced then a filthy hand so that she could help him up, patted the dirt from his torn jacket away, and threw a scared look at MacCready, who was standing just behind her and was angry.

"For a reasonable price," he rolled his tongue over his chapped lips, "you'll relive the past, girl. For a reasonable price. Come, come, the first trip is on discount. Just come inside and see."

And he dragged her by the arm towards the big double door with the fancy sign over it, that read 'Memory Den'. At night, the sign's letters gave out a flickering red color, like the lights of a brothel. MacCready had always thought that the sign originally read 'Massage Den' – which meant brothel in the old tongue, someone had told him – and they had changed it now. But anyway, he didn't really care so much, as he didn't intend on going inside.

"Listen here, kid," he told her as she was about to follow the lizard. "OK – we hit the Jet, we also hit Psycho, and it was fun; but remember I told you, don't score too much because you'll be like those red-eyed losers, and then probably lying dead on some piss-stained alley? Remember that? Well, this is another thing here. They're gonna feed you a line and strip you off, and mess with your head. I knew someone who started coming in here every week, then every day, and then he was left broke and brain-dead. Do you wanna screw with your mind, is that what you want?"

The girl wrenched herself free of his grip and told him, frowning, "I want to remember. I need it," and then gave him a cheeky, 'you're-not-my-daddy' look, or something like that.

"Fine," he said displeased, shrugging his shoulders. "Your caps, your business; go ahead and burn it out," and he placed his index finger on his forehead.

He swiftly regretted not insisting more, as he watched her walking away, the big double door closing behind her; regretted not finding something better to tell her. He even regretted giving her to try the Jet that he had found on those Raiders, but it had been so long since the last time he'd scored Jet and he wanted to get high, and it was certainly better with company. He truly thought it'd be good for her too, because her mood had darkened dangerously lately, and he often caught her staring blankly into space, lost in thoughts. He understood it, too; this world she had woken up into was too cruel and dirty, and the girl was soft and gentle, and had lost everything she loved. But after the first fix, she had fallen in great depths of melancholy, and he could only sit and wait for her head to clear out, hours after the irradiated rain had stopped and they could finally step out of that damn garage. She reminded him of how he was when he was getting high with booze and Jet after Lucy's death, but he could take it, he'd never let it drag him down. Maybe the fact that he had to take care of a baby had helped too, or maybe it was the material he was made of. Who knows. He'd also do anything to be able to see Lucy's face or Duncan's like a movie, inside his head, but there was no way he would let them stick cables on his head. He'd have to do with memories, as murky as they became day by day.

But anyway, she paid him to teach her how to shoot and hold a pistol, not to play parent to her. She could do as she wanted.

He put his hands in the pockets of his trousers and gave a lazy kick to a small aluminum can that was lying down, on the dirt. He was trying to figure out what to do to pass the time when he heard his soft whining down near his hand. 'Oh, that's swell, she left me with the mutt, too,' he thought, but he still patted him on the head and told him, "Let's go, Dogmeat." He was a good dog, and useful. The name was his idea.

They climbed the metal staircase at the back of the old bank, and went straight to the rooftop. He sat down on the cold cement, near some railings where the staircase ended, his legs hanging down in the air, and his elbows resting on the rusty metal. The sun was setting slowly and some light bulbs underneath him, in the shantytown, had begun to glow. Few people roamed the dusty streets, some trying to patch up the holes in their crude houses, some others tried to exchange whatever piece of junk they'd collected here and there for some expired can of food, or for some meat, or water. Classical music could be heard from an antique radio somewhere, mixed with the buzzing noise of the power generators.

MacCready fumbled inside the inner pocket of his duster for cigarettes; he found two uncut ones and was grateful. Damn, it was getting harder and harder to find cigarettes in that mess, and they had now become a luxury. The girl snatched a few now and then, and handed them over to him – she occasionally kept one or two for herself, she didn't smoke very much – something that he found particularly pleasing and, if he wanted to be honest, somewhat cute. Because, despite his teachings and his counsel, the girl insisted on not stealing anything else, even when a unique opportunity came up – even when a Stimpak or a bottle of purified water were found left on a bench, without their owner in sight. The only exception she made was for cigarettes, and then she hardly kept any for herself. MacCready shook his head smiling. She was truly strange. He wondered if she was doing it to win him over, to have him on her side in a future misadventure, or she was just trying to compensate for his constant disapproval when she didn't do things as he wanted. Or both. Or it was simply that he'd pestered her beyond her limits with his nagging.

He'd been strict on her, it was true, but wasn't this the only way to make her see, to make her survive? And she hadn't done badly – no, no, she hadn't done badly at all. First time they set out to find Valentine, crouching through Boston's ruins, they took a turn in a seemingly empty alleyway and some wild dogs that were scavenging for food through the piles of dirt and debris smelled them out. They were three and they were bony and disgusting, with open wounds and loose skin hanging like torn clothes from their limbs, saliva dripping from their growling mouths, flashing their sharp fangs to them. MacCready wished that their first encounter with the horrors of the Commonwealth would be doped Raiders, so that they could get rid of them one-by-one from a distance, with the sniper rifle. But the Commonwealth had apparently other plans for them, and had sent them wild dogs; wild dogs it would be then. He didn't much like it because he didn't know how the girl would react on a hand-to-hand combat, but it was already too late to run off – the dogs were ravenous and were now getting ready to attack, so he snatched her arm and dragged her close to him, saying, "Behind me!"

He took out the revolver from the holster that was hanging from his belt and pointed at one dog, before it had the time to move, and it fell down howling a few seconds later. The other two rushed at them. Now MacCready was fast, but not _that_ fast, especially when he had to cock that ancient revolver every time – if he had the automatic pistol it would have been different, but he had given it to the girl because he thought it would be easier for her. One dog grabbed his leg and MacCready screamed in pain, before he put a bullet through its head. He hadn't thought about the first dog, though, which was hit on the ribs and was still alive, and who was now attacking his right arm, the one that held the gun, forcing him to drop it on the ground. The pain was burning, but he grabbed the dog's ear nonetheless, almost pulling it apart, and wrenched the animal just a few inches away from his bleeding hand. He was facing it now, a howling mess, fangs and red gums, and bloodstained yellow eyes. He threw it away and kicked its muzzle with his boot, and then quickly reached down, grabbed the gun, and shot it in its open mouth.

Only then was he finally able to turn around and look at the other growling that was heard behind him, and he saw the third dog twisting and writhing over the girl, who was lying on her back, with one hand clutching the animal's neck, holding it a few inches away from her face, while her other hand was trying to pull something out of her belt. The dog's front paws were frantically tearing her skin apart, on her neck and on her cheeks, and on her chest.

In the few seconds that passed until everything ended, MacCready could have gone and pulled the dog away from her face. But he didn't. Now that he was thinking all these, he realized that it was something deliberate, but he wasn't able to grasp it clearly back then. Back then, he was just standing there, waiting. He wanted to see. He wanted to see what _she_ would do.

And she finally pulled the combat knife from her belt and plunged it into the dog's forehead, letting it fall dead over her, splashing her already bloody face. She pushed it aside and got up quickly, desperate, all flushed up with adrenaline and terror, looking first at the dog's carcass and then at the man in front of her, who was studying her, pleased, unable to really see him. Her right hand was closed tight around the combat knife, which was now painted red with the dog's blood. No, she hadn't done badly, for a first-timer.

He grabbed her by the shoulders to make her stop trembling and took her aside, holding her all the time, and made her sit on top of a closed trashcan.

"Let's look at you – just hold still," he said as he turned his head right and left and his fingers were inspecting her, faintly tracing the marks on her neck and hands, where the fabric from her trench coat had been torn, and then he grabbed her chin to hold her head still and squinted at her forehead. Her wounds must have stung painfully, but they were surface wounds, nothing too serious; not like that deep gush on her forehead that was dripping hot blood, rolling down next to her right eye and travelling to her neck and through her open shirt. This one needed stitching up.

Well, they _could_ crawl back to Goodneighbor and have Ben tend to them, but he reckoned that the girl would have lost a lot of blood till then and, after all, he did carry a needle and thread along for times like this, so he decided to do it himself, on the spot.

He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and a half-empty bottle of whiskey he had scavenged somewhere, dampened the handkerchief with alcohol, and cleaned her face with that. The girl complained and hot tears rolled down her cheeks, and she made a motion backwards, but he grabbed her chin again and told her, "Hold on now, we have to do this – hold still, damn it!"

He lit one of his matches and put the needle's end over the flame, then licked the thread and passed it skillfully through the tiny hole. He turned to her and saw her hunched over, her lip turned downwards, so miserable.

"This is gonna hurt a little, but it's not something you can't take. Here, drink some of this," he suggested, and he thrust the bottle at her face. She obeyed, like she always did, and took a sip, twisting her face in disgust.

He went and stood very close to her then, his face only a few inches away from hers, breathing – he was sure of that – on her skin. He understood that she was uncomfortable, not only because of what he was about to do, but also because of the proximity between them, and she made the slightest of movements backwards, but he pulled her steady, towards him.

"Will you hold still, for fuck's sake…?"

The business with the needle was simple, it was over in less than two minutes, but for some seconds, when he brought his face down at her forehead and cut the thread with his teeth, when his lips almost touched her skin, and also afterwards, when he stood and examined the job he had done – well, at those few moments, he had a strange notion to bend over and kiss her. She looked miserable, crusts of blood and dirt all over her, hair disheveled, and on her sun-kissed cheeks, some streams of clean skin, where the tears were flowing. Her lips were crimson-red and swollen. Miserable and lovable.

But he just patted her on the shoulder and said, "You done good; you just have to be faster," and moved a few feet away to look after his own wounds. The sun had begun to set, so they decided it was too late and started going back to their base. They would find Valentine the next day – "tomorrow's another day," he told her.

He now rolled up his right sleeve. Whatever had been left from that bite were some swollen red lumps, which in time would turn whiter than the rest of the skin, they would turn into scars. 'Nice, that's another mark in my collection,' he thought bitterly.

Another time, before the dogs, the dawn had found them in that abandoned house where they'd taken shelter for the night, him on the floor and her on the tattered couch, and had seen her get up suddenly, rummaging through her backpack, and then disappearing into the kitchen. She turned and looked towards his direction for a moment, but it was dark where he was lying, his head half-hidden behind his hands, so she couldn't tell if he was awake or not. He heard some shuffling from the kitchen, a shivering, and clothes taken off and put on again. The girl finally came back, with that tight-fitting blue uniform on her thin body, which all those Vault thumbsuckers wore. Oh, he remembered that Vault uniform well, number on the back and all. When he'd first seen it, it had the number 101, and this one here was 111. He knew that Raiders – and settlers, why not – would pull every trick to get hold of it, though it wasn't really in your interest to wear it and parade it around the outside world, 'cause you'd soon turn dead. The girl had obviously understood this and she had stuffed it in her backpack, so MacCready wondered what the hell had gotten hold of her and she'd decided to put it on now. But soon he felt the chilly wind on his skin, getting stronger outside and rushing through the cracks of the wooden walls, and understood. The girl was cold.

She had carried back her shirt and pants, and that trench coat that she was wearing, which was awfully big for her, and she was about to put all these over the skinny blue uniform, but, before she had time to do it, MacCready got the chance, hidden as he was in darkness, to peer at her figure, clearly outlined now in the dim light. People didn't wear this kind of clothes anymore, only rags and mismatched trousers and jackets and coats, and whatever they found here and there, inside forgotten closets or on forgotten people who didn't live anymore. You couldn't make out their bodies inside that motley assortment of clothes, but so what? What good would it do to make out scraggy, sick bodies?

But this girl here was pretty, thin but with nice, feminine curves, and MacCready caught himself wanting to place his hand where her hip formed a soft hollow, as she was bending her body to the right. It wasn't something erotic – or at least that's what he wanted to believe; he was just overcome with a strange desire to see if his palm would actually fit over there, in that small place on her body. The girl bent over, put her legs one-by-one inside the trousers, buttoned up her shirt, quickly put on her oversized trench coat, and her silhouette was gone. MacCready pretended to be asleep.

He looked at his hands under the flickering lights of Goodneighbor. They were filthy, with dust, dirt, sweat – blood. How could he touch the girl with those hands, how could it even have crossed his mind? He had touched her hand sometimes, when he was showing her how to hold the rifle, and the contrast was so striking – hers was a dainty hand, white and clean. Unspoiled.

'Fuck this.'

He fumbled again in his inner pocket, not the one where he kept the cigarettes, in another one, sewn by himself and better hidden, and he drew out the small wooden soldier that she had given him, a little after they had met. He put it in front of him, so that he could see it more clearly in the dim light, and he rubbed it softly here and there with his rough thumb. The color had chipped off in a few places. He felt the sorrow flowing slowly down the empty well that was his innards and wondered why he was still keeping this memento, why he was making himself remember. He had thought about getting rid of it many times before, but whenever he was about to do it, he felt bad and he just didn't have the guts. It would be as if he was betraying her and everything they'd lived together, as if he was waving the final goodbye to their son – was he still alive? No, he couldn't say goodbye, not yet, not as long as there was still hope for that kid. He'd trained himself to endure the empty well after some time had passed, provided he had work to do and booze to help him sink into oblivion, but he was realizing now that, even with those few days he had spent beside her - he came to understand that he had gotten used to the girl's presence next to him and, oddly, talking to her and showing her and teaching her was more effective than both rifle and liquor.

He made a rough estimation of the days that were left until their unofficial contract was over, and they were five. In five days then. He would probably give the few caps he had to that guy, Sinclair, and as for the girl, she was broke beyond doubt. And thus their partnership would come to an end and each of them would go their own way, wherever that was.

'I might as well keep her,' he thought, and at that moment he saw the dog sit up and wag his tail, smelling something that he could not, and heard steps on the metal staircase; and there was the girl, with swollen eyes and – he was sure – several caps lighter.

'Sometimes it's better not to remember,' he wanted to tell her. But he said nothing.

* * *

Chapter's "end-titles" song: Dallas Acid - Dreams == .../watch?v=1BV6XTUGKLY (copy-paste after YouTube's URL)


	7. Chapter 7

She had asked him once why those people had attacked her when she had first came out of the Vault and he'd said to her:  
"Because they were Raiders. And Raiders do exactly this: they'll kill you and they'll take what's yours; not necessarily in that order. And especially if they saw you with that fancy blue uniform of yours and the Pip-Boy, well, then they'd surely want to do you in."  
"So… wait. So, who are they exactly?"  
"They're all kinds of losers, junkie punks, too wild to live in settlements, too undisciplined to become Gunners. The only thing they understand is a nice bullet up their head and that's that – this is the only interaction you should have with those shi…," he stopped himself before uttering the word, "… with their kind. And you're lucky, kid, you didn't end up in their filthy hands, 'cause killing you would be the least they'd do. If you catch my drift."

One day, they were passing by an apartment block that used to be rented flats – because there was a half-burnt sign high up on the second floor, reading 'Ap…tments f… R…nt' – and they saw that the whole ground floor was barricaded with walls made of wood and metal, wire and car tires, and then Nora saw, in terror, tied up against one of the walls, with chains hanging from its arms and legs that were wide open, like a grotesque parody of Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, a headless corpse. MacCready took her hand and pulled her down so that they could walk stealthily away from there, and whispered to her, "There, these are Raiders."

For MacCready they were animals – less than animals, to be exact – and if he chanced upon them and had to kill some of them – which he had – he didn't feel any kind of remorse. And maybe, the way things were, he was right. There would be a time though, very later in her life, when Nora would discover what Raiders really were. It was so easy, so liberating to just dismiss them as rabid animals; but they were only people. They were just more broken than the rest and they had to stick Psycho needles through their veins so that they would stand the crumbling world around them – well, hadn't everyone got their own 'drugs' after all? There would be a time when Nora would find a terminal, herself surrounded by three dead bodies, and in that terminal she'd read random thoughts on random dates, that went somewhat like this:

 _03/12/2286: The only thing I want is for my little Myriam to make it. Burt thinks that doing errands here and there will earn us enough caps to exchange for food in Diamond City. Well, he's wrong. Five months have gone by and our supplies are desperately low. I can't stand looking Myriam in the eyes, telling her that we got no more food. I just can't._

 _04/02/2286: Stan and Finlow came by today with a box of cans and five bottles of water. When we asked them where they got them, they said it was a 'gift' from a caravan. They had their rifles hanging from their shoulders, so we all knew what kind of gift this was. Burt was furious, but I told him that we didn't have another choice. We're hungry. Myriam won't make it much longer. He wouldn't budge and he sent them away, told them not to set foot on the settlement again. I told him that if he thinks we're gonna survive on the crumbs that those Diamond City assholes give us, he's very stupid, and we had a bad fight._

 _04/30/2286: Today I buried my Myriam. We buried Burt next to her. I killed him with my own hands._

 _05/28/2286: Stan and Finlow are with us again. Things are going well. The rest of them listen to me and I don't give a fuck if someone disagrees, they can go away or get shot, it's their choice. Stan told me they call us 'raiders' now. I don't know what this means, but I wish we'd done all these earlier. Perhaps my Myriam would have been alive._

About ten days had gone by since she'd hired him when they reached a bridge, one of the few ones that hadn't gone down, with abandoned cars all along the cracked road, messily piled on top of each other, a memento of people's futile attempts to escape before the bombs fell. As they walked on the big lumps of asphalt, tiptoeing their way through the vehicles, they saw them, some feet away, near the other end of the bridge, where the cars were fewer. They were three men, armed. They were wearing handmade armor from pieces of tires, pots, and machine components, attached to their naked skins with straps or duct tape. One of them yelled, "You give us your caps and anything else you got, or kiss the dust. Don't fucking do nothing stupid now," and all three pointed their guns at them.

MacCready's fingers tensed on his rifle. He threw her a side-glance and hissed, "Count to three and hide behind the car," and that's exactly what she did – she ran and crouched behind the turned-over Corvega that was next to her – and when the gunshots started, she saw MacCready give a jump and land full length behind a light-blue minivan. She knew the plan very well, he'd made a point to repeat it to her every time they set out on their journeys, and she still had his words in her mind: "You're gonna find a hiding place and let me do the heavy work," "you're gonna back me with the sniper rifle; you hear me, kid, do you understand?" Yes, she understood, in theory; she'd only wished she didn't have to do it and then wished again she had to, while he was still with her, 'cause that would be the only way to learn. So she had laid herself face down, her right eye on the lens, watching one Raider load his rifle in order to shoot again. A clean shot. That's the only thing she needed. A soft, sure pull of the trigger. The man had half his head shaven and a mane of long greasy hair was hanging on his left side, reaching his chest. He was scrawny and tanned. He was wearing an army boot on one foot and a brown shoe on the other. Nora was trying to breathe, but she was suffocating, and the air around her felt thick and hot, although it was winter.

She turned her head right and saw the mercenary reload the rifle, letting himself peep out of his cover behind the van and shoot, and then back again. He had put some good sights on that gun – "you gotta take care of your gun so that it takes care of you, too" – and he was a good shot himself, anyway. The man in the middle fell first. He turned to her and she saw his lips moving, forming words, like, 'Shoot him, for fuck's sake!,' and she felt that everything went blurry and hollow, among the whizzing of the bullets through the air and the clanks on the metal. The dog, who was next to her all that time and was growling, decided to get out of his hiding place behind the Corvega and attack the foot of the man who was on the right. He punched him hard with the stock of his rifle and the dog scuttled away, whining. This, however, gave MacCready the chance to shoot a bullet at the man's belly, and he fell writhing on the ground. The man with the greasy mohawk had come closer now and had taken cover behind a red Cherry Bomb. His torso emerged the same moment MacCready peeped out of the side of the van and a bullet got him at the left shoulder. MacCready retreated quickly behind his cover, clenching his half-rotten teeth, trying to fight the pain.

Nora looked inside the sights' lens. She could see the Cherry Bomb very clearly. The man behind it wasn't bothered with her, he had forgotten she even existed. When his head emerged again, Nora pulled the trigger and his scull burst into pieces, in an explosion of flesh, blood, and brains. Silence.

When MacCready finally came near her, she was sitting with her back on the car's window, her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around, trying to suppress a tear. MacCready was clutching his left shoulder, which was now full of blood, staining his green sleeve, the one from a different fabric, that was sewn on his duster. Amidst his groans, he managed to tell her, "Well, thanks for nothing, boss. What the hell?" She put her head down and didn't say anything. She thought he must have been pissed at her now, really-really pissed, because she'd fucked up more than any other time.

"Whatever. Get up here and help me bind the wound."  
Luckily for them, the bullet had brushed past his shoulder and hadn't penetrated it.

As she was injecting him with a Stimpak for the pain and was wrapping a piece of cloth they were carrying as bandage around his naked shoulder, she examined his face, tanned like that Raider's, thin lines around his eyes, sharp nose, fine, blond facial hair around his mouth and on his chin; he seemed more tired than angry, as he was looking down now, patiently receiving her care. He took a cigarette out of his right pocket, cut it in two, and lit it. Whenever Nora gave him cigarettes she'd scavenged, he would smile, and the first thing he'd do was to cut them in two. He was practical like this and he liked to smoke. Sometimes he would put them in his pocket uncut, but he'd always make sure he'd cut them later on, when he was about to smoke.

"I couldn't pull the trigger," she told him bluntly and felt ashamed right away. It was funny. It was something that would sound completely normal before the war.  
"You have to, though," he told her and she thought he looked kind of sad. He looked up and stared at her, and she saw something in his blue eyes, but it wasn't anger, no. She thought – she thought it was something like understanding.

When they finally crossed that bridge, Nora had her head down all the time, walking in quick, furtive steps, so that she wouldn't see the bodies, or the mercenary who was stooped over them, searching their pockets, or hear the dog munching – but most of all, most of everything else, so that she wouldn't look towards the red Cherry Bomb.

* * *

Chapter's "end-titles" song: Dimmu Borgir - Det Nye Riket == .../watch?v=NkvCSWXucG8 (paste after YouTube's URL)


	8. Chapter 8

"I have a job in mind, if you're interested," he'd told her one day when they were resting on the upper stands of the stadium that was now known as Diamond City, him with a beer in his hand, the girl with a Nuka Cola. The sun was setting and it was red, and a soft wind was coming from the west, from the Glowing Sea, and smelled burned plastic and irradiated dust.

It was his last day with her. Their three-week contract had ended. When he asked her what she'd do next, she told him that she might go and work in one of the farms, if they had jobs to give her, or she'd return to her old neighborhood and she could even try to set up her own farm there, near her old home. She wanted to look confident, to behave as if she didn't care, but her head was turned elsewhere without looking at him straight and her tone was sour.

"So, what? After all the things I taught you, you're gonna be a farmer?" he scoffed.  
"Why? Did you imagine me as a mercenary?" she replied, in an equally playful way, smiling and looking at him with those childish brown eyes.  
"No, I guess not," he said, laughing.

As they were seated then over there, on the rusty stands, he decided to let her in on that proposition that was going around his mind from the moment Sinclair had given him the codes to the hospital, and if that wasn't the right moment to tell her, there never would be another.

"What kind of job?" she asked and he thought he noticed a slight tone of excitement in her voice.

So he started telling her, although it was so goddamn difficult for him, about the woman and the child he'd left behind at the Capital Wasteland, before coming to the Commonwealth, and about his son's sickness, who was just three years old but his skin had broken out in boils and he couldn't even stand on his feet last time MacCready had seen him.

"Why did you leave?" she asked.  
"I couldn't do differently. There was no work for me back in the Wasteland. Most of the caps I make here I send to Duncan. I had no choice," he said, almost apologetically, his eyes looking down. It was true, but wasn't the whole truth. He didn't tell her that he couldn't stand living inside that house anymore, without Lucy and with a dying infant in his care, nor did he tell her that he'd rather be outside on the road, with his rifle, forgetting, than next to his son, locked up inside four walls, suffocating.

"Are you planning on going back then?"  
"Well, yeah, when Duncan gets well; yes, I wanna go and bring him here." It might have sounded strange that he didn't mention his wife, but the girl had the discreet politeness no to ask anything more.

He told her about that guy, Sinclair, too, whom he had first met last time they were in Diamond City and he'd told him about another guy who was also suffering from boils and inflammations but had gotten well with a serum they'd found in a pre-war facility with labs and weird medical stuff, called 'Med-Tek Research'. And told her that he'd given every last cap he had left to get hold of the entrance codes for that damn hospital or whatever 'Med-Tek Research' was supposed to be.

"Soo…. what I'm suggesting," and at that point he paused, cleared his throat, and had a sip of warm beer, "is getting inside the hospital and grab the cure. That id… - that guy, Sinclair, told me that there were more of those vials with the cure from where he'd snatched it. And in return," he said and straightened his back, giving her that cocky look he got when he was uncomfortable but didn't want to show it, "I'm offering you my unsurpassed protection services for an extra two weeks, totally free of charge. So? Whad'ya say, boss?" It was so long ago since he'd called her 'boss' that it sounded a total mockery and strange, and he got worried that he maybe went a bit too far.

The girl kept her eyes down, scratching the rust from the railing in front of her with her fingernail, and eventually mumbled, without looking at him:

"Why me?"  
"Why… Because you're the only person I trust?" he exclaimed, raising his arms high, as if to make a point of how irrational her question was. "Because… - because all those ass… - all the people I've ever met on this shitty land wanted either to rob me or plant a knife behind my back."

Which was true, but not the whole truth.

The girl smiled with his efforts not to swear – some of them were not really successful.

"If you need a partner for this, it means that it's not the easiest thing in the world," she snapped.  
"It's not a ride in the park, I'm not gonna lie to you – if it was, I'd do it myself. Thing is… Sinclair told me that… there are ferals in the building."  
"Oh…," said the girl, with a dark look.  
"And before you start, I wouldn't even suggest it if I didn't know you could make it," he added hurriedly, as if to hold her from making any dark thoughts.

Because he knew what kind of thoughts they'd be.

First time the girl saw a feral was one day, at noon, when they'd passed by a diner and decided to do some scavenging for any forgotten cans or pre-war money that could be exchanged for food or water. One couldn't know where or when a feral would pop up, he'd told her that much, so they scanned the area carefully before beginning their search, but they'd probably missed a darker corner because, as the girl was behind the counter, inspecting the dusty shelves, a shuffling was heard from the kitchen at the back, and a growling, and he knew exactly what that meant.

He hissed a "Nora! Behind you!" to her, but it was already too late; in the few seconds that it took her hand to reach down and pull the knife from its holster, the creature had emerged from its hiding place and was running frantically towards her. Those bastards! They did run fast. It had an ashy, brownish color, the color of rotten meat, its skin was hanging loose from its skeletal body, and the few clothes that were left on it were tattered and torn. When he looked at it later, when it was lying dead on the floor, its rags reminded him vaguely of a dress. It might have been a woman once, in an older life, before its brain got rotten and eaten from the inside.

So the girl would have breathed her last, there and then, no doubt about it. Even if the thing didn't manage to eat her alive, it would have at least managed to bite off a good chunk of her skin, and then she would die slowly and painfully from the wound. MacCready pulled out the .45 pistol and, almost automatically, hit a headshot on the living-dead abomination just as it was ready to tear the girl's face apart with its claws. The girl was just standing stunned and motionless all that time, knife still in her hand. The creature half-landed on her while it was falling down and her face got splattered with juices, meat parts, and irradiated blood. But it hadn't bitten her, thank God for that.

It was one of the most unpleasant experiences she could ever have, he understood this, surely more unpleasant than the dogs and those Raiders they had found at the bridge when she had to actually kill a living person. What he couldn't understand was the hysterics that had followed. She had come out of this alive, hadn't she?

The girl wiped the blood and brains off her face with instinctive, hurried strokes, keeping her eyes tightly shut. She opened them afterwards and looked at the dead, ashen creature on her feet, holstered her knife, and started walking slowly towards the door. She paced past MacCready like a ghost, staring forward only, and when he tried to hold her by the arm ("Hey, you all right?" he only managed to say), she just ignored him.

The diner was located at the center of a seaside neighborhood and when the girl stepped out, on the cracked road, she headed towards the nearby beach, beyond the tilted wooden houses. MacCready followed her with the .45er in his hand.

"Kid! Hey, boss! Nora!"

But the girl just thrust herself down on the dirty sand, brought her hands in front of her to see them clearly under the midday sun, side up first and then turned them over to see her palms, as if she was seeing them for the first time in her life. They were bloody red and her face now smudged with sweat, dirt, and ghoul liquids, strands of hair stuck on her forehead and her cheeks. MacCready stood right above her holding a piece of cloth and said, "Let's wipe this face clea…", but before he even had the chance to finish his sentence, the girl started taking off her clothes frantically, first the trench coat, then her boots and, balancing herself on one leg, tried desperately to pull down her pants, unbuttoned her shirt hurriedly, almost tearing it apart, as she was pulling her arms out of the sleeves, and threw the Pip-Boy on the sand. She was finally left with her white panties and an also white bra, on that cold February day, just like that, without a hint of shame. MacCready tried to hold her from whatever foolishness she was about to do, but she wrenched her arm free from his grip so violently that he almost fall over, and started running towards the sea.

"Are you crazy? The water's not good!" he yelled.

But she ignored him once more, mumbling something like 'I can't take this anymore' and 'I want to take this thing off me' and other stuff like this. She fell into the gray sea trembling, until the water reached just above her waist, and started rubbing her hands and then her face and her hair, and her body, with such a violent rush that one would think she wanted to flay her skin. The bones on her sides were visible and her skin was pale, with a few bruises here and there, except her face, which had gotten a bit tanned by then.

She finally came out, shivering all over, her arms crossed over her chest, clinging on her body tightly. She was clean now, sure, and full of radiation. Her eyes had shed their previous catatonic stare and she could finally really see him, as he was standing facing her. And he was really pissed. Her underclothes were wet and had become transparent, and one could see everything now, nipples, pubes – it was more than he should see and he looked away, fumbling inside his rucksack for a RadAway solution. He found one, the only one they had left, stuck the end of the pack inside a syringe, and came close to her to administer the injection. She was now crouching on the sand, still naked, shivering violently. All hair on her skin was standing up. He grabbed her arm tightly, stuck the needle on the skin, and told her: "You're really stupid – I hope you know it." And he let her get dressed. He was too angry to say anything else. Her foolishness had cost them one RadAway and they'd need at least one more later on, which meant that they should waste all their provisions and caps for this, instead of food and water and ammo. 'Jesus, the stupidity…,' he thought, kicking the sand furiously, as he was heading for the road. 'What a waste, what a waste…'

After a few minutes she caught up with him, and she was silent, her head stooped down. Her hair was hanging in dark brown strands from her hat, dripping. After one hour, she started vomiting whatever she'd eaten in the morning and after everything was out, she dry heaved. At the end of the day, when they had finally reached Goodneighbor, she had broken out with a reddish rush all over her body.

They rented their usual room up at Rexford Hotel, she curled over the double bed and he lied on the battered sofa, as per usual. He put one arm behind his head, as a pillow, and he stayed there, staring at the cracked ceiling. He knew she wasn't asleep either. After a few minutes, she asked him:

"Does the pain ever stop?"

This was the first thing that was uttered between them after the incident at the beach.

"No, not really. But you learn to live with it after a while and you don't mind so much. You'll see. You'll learn," he said, hoarsely.

They didn't say anything after that and, in a way, he felt that they'd made peace for the events earlier that day and that a silent understanding had passed between them. He closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep, but the image of her wet body came to his mind again and again, the pointy nipples inside the soaked bra, the dark triangle of her pubis, her skinny, shivering arms, the hair spiking across her pale skin. He finally managed to fall asleep, only to dream about that metro station again, but in this dream it was him who was being devoured by the ferals, while Lucy was escaping with the baby in her arms. He woke up early in the morning, soaking wet. He wished it had happened like that.

Despite all these, the girl finally announced, after thinking about it for a few seconds: "I'm in. But you'll stay with me for three weeks. And whatever we find inside Med-Tek is mine."  
"Ha! I see you're driving a hard bargain," he chuckled. "It seems my lessons have finally paid off. Fine; three weeks and all loot is yours."

In truth, he was willing to give her whatever she would ask. The only thing he cared about was what he was supposed to find. And as for the three-week bargain? Did he also care about that? He couldn't admit it, even to himself, even in those silent nights before falling asleep when he tried not to think but he couldn't escape it; he couldn't admit that, if they managed to pull this through and stay alive, nothing would make him happier than stay with the girl a little longer.

Of course, he didn't tell her all that. He didn't tell her that he wasn't really sure if she was cut for this kind of job. He just instructed her to keep behind him and cover him with the rifle, while he'd be in front doing the heavy stuff, like he'd taught her.

When they reached the building, after one and a half hour walking, it was getting dark and a thick veil of mist was enveloping everything and made it look a little less real. The dampness got on his nerves and was steaming up the glass of his helmet, the one he'd found in a warehouse and the girl had told him it looked like a pilot's helmet. He didn't care what this piece of junk was used for before the war, but it was hard, solid metal, and could protect his head.

The building was really big and covered with moss and thick branches, which were swirling around it like serpents, making it look like those haunted houses in the comic books of the olden days. It was curiously almost untouched by the big boom, as far as they were able to see at least, and all the walls seemed upright and standing. On top of the big double door there was a big sign reading 'Med-Tek'. Next to it, there was the entrance terminal. MacCready was about to enter the codes himself, but then he got anxious and insecure, something which happened whenever he had to touch anything technologically more advanced than a rifle, so he produced a yellowish, crumpled piece of paper from the inside of his shooting jacket and handed it over to the girl. She cleared away the sticky dust from the terminal's monitor with her sleeve, pressed a couple of keys, and the big double red door opened with a loud clank.

They entered a big hall, complete with a reception desk, couches, armchairs, vases, carpets – everything untouched. The only thing that marked the passage of time was the thick cover of dust and the cobwebs that were spread on almost everything, like ash-brown snow. Everything was still and quiet, dead; non-existent.

MacCready started to realize that except Sinclair, no one had ever entered this unit since the bombs fell. And no one had ever left. Those who had been locked inside would be now dead if lucky enough. They stumbled through the interior of the building blindly, along the pitch-black corridors, occasionally using the Pip-Boy's green light to find their way. Upon a turn, they almost tripped over something that rattled loudly – when the girl turned the light on the floor, they saw a skeleton. Eventually, they reached an iron door with the sign 'Labs'; he turned enthusiastically to face her, whispering, "That's it!"

The door however opened only through a terminal, which was locked. Sinclair hadn't given him anything else, just the password for the entrance.

"Fuck… I don't believe this!" MacCready spat. The girl, though, squinted at the old monitor thoughtfully and, after a while, started pressing different keys, paused, and back again.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked her, annoyed.  
"Just wait a little, I think I have this. The security here isn't very strong – just wait, let me think," she told him and MacCready stepped back and leaned across the wall, arms crossed, contemplating all the ways he could kill Sinclair if their paths ever crossed again.

After some minutes, she announced triumphantly that she'd made it, giving the monitor a loud tap of enthusiasm. Doors opened, creaking and clanking loudly. She turned swiftly to face him – he was sitting on the floor by that time – and went, "Impressed yet?" with that cocky tone that was all his.  
"Yeah, yeah," he said, "you're gonna show me this trick some other time. Time to go."

But he was impressed. Turned out that the girl wasn't _that_ useless, after all. Survival-wise, of course.

They found themselves in a hall that lead to a long, wide corridor, on either side of which there were small rooms with large windows. At the end of the corridor there was another door and there, when they came closer, they were able to see a sign reading 'Laboratory staff only'. They walked slowly along the corridor, their arms almost touching, guns in hand, safeties off, staring at the dirty, murky windows at the locked up rooms. Inside each room there were a few basic furniture – a bed, a bedside table, a chair – but, when they stuck their faces on the glass, wiping off the dust, squinting to see more clearly in the semi-darkness, they were able to make out something else in there, something that was curled up and naked, soft and slimy, as if it was drawn from children's nightmares of monsters underneath their bed.

"They were doing experiments," murmured the girl, frightened beyond her senses, gawking at the creature that was sluggishly starting to wake up. "They locked them up and ran experiments on them and when they bombs fell they left them here to die," she went on.

"They'd be dead anyway," he said. "Well, good for us that they're in there and not out here, kid." He headed towards the large door at the end of the corridor. At the door's foot there was another skeleton, in a yellowish doctor's robe. There were two small windows on that door and when he looked inside, he saw only long tables with machines and instruments, and various monitors with buttons and gauges. On an iron table he could see a pre-war instrument that someone had told him once it was called a 'microstop', or something (he had no idea what that thing was supposed to stop), and nearby there were a few empty vials next to one that was full with a greenish-blue liquid.

'That's it,' he thought excitedly. Everything was exactly like Sinclair had described: long corridor, rooms on either side, lab at the end. The one thing he couldn't figure out was why Sinclair had mentioned that he should be mindful of ferals; yeah, there were ferals all right, but they were securely locked up in their rooms, nice and easy. He turned and looked back and then left and right. Nope, no ferals in sight, except those suckers in the rooms. Unless they'd gotten smarter and figured out how to unlock doors, they'd be OK.

He motioned to the girl to come over to a terminal on a desk at the hall. "Can you open the door with this?" he asked and she started swiftly to tap away at the keys, computer cranking as it woke up. But after a few green lines had run along the monitor and she'd reached the final command, she paused and looked at him with worried eyes.

The monitor read:  
 _STATUS: EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN  
OPTIONS: [OPEN DOORS]_

'Open _doors?'_ It suddenly dawned on him that Sinclair had never been into the lab itself. Maybe he had found his serum elsewhere, maybe that skeleton by the lab door was holding it. Whatever had happened, Sinclair hadn't set foot in the lab, 'cause if he had, it would mean that all doors would have opened and about a dozen creatures would have rushed out to tear him apart. 'Well, ain't life a bitch,' he thought.

"At least we know where they'll be coming from, right?" he told her, giving her a nudge, although he knew and she knew very well that they had to come up with a good plan to stay alive.

He stayed put for some time, lost in thought. For a moment he had half a mind to ask her if she was still up for this, if she wanted to bail out; but then he thought that since they'd come all this way, they might as well go through with this, so he said nothing. He felt a wave of shame coming over him, for all those moments he pretended he was her savior, for all the promises he'd given to himself that he'd protect her, when he knew very well that he placed the child above everything else. He had him in his arms and was running, listening to Lucy's screams behind him all the while, thinking, 'I've got to save him – save _him_ , at least.' It was too late for her.

'You shouldn't have asked her. You're a selfish bastard and a piece of shit,' said the voice in his head.

And ask who? No mercenary would have ever followed him on this with the chickenfeed he had to offer, while that girl had agreed so willingly to that suicide mission; and for what? That girl, who had come from another time and had managed to stay alive, had now signed her death sentence.

He shook his head then to dismiss those thoughts, as if it was cigarette smoke that he was waving away with his hands. He had helped her and now she would help him, there was nothing more to think about.

"Listen up," he turned and said to her, in his serious tone, "give me the automatic pistol and keep the rifle. Hide underneath that desk as soon as the doors open and cover me when I reload the gun."

And then:  
"Listen, Nora," (he called her Nora when things got more serious), "if something goes wrong and I don't make it – don't pull that face, I said _if_ , I'm not saying it will – you gotta run into the lab and get that blue vial with the cure, and then give it to Daisy in Goodneighbor. She'll see that it reaches my son." He gave her a grim look. "Do you promise?" The girl nodded that she did, gloomily.

He came a step closer to pull the glass of her helmet down and he thought that it'd be nice to touch her cheek, since he didn't know if he'd see her again, but then he decided this was way too melodramatic and this wasn't the time for dramas – and, after all, it was a bit hard with that biker's helmet she was wearing. She was all set up, looking so bulky in her outfit, military pants and a leather jacket (this was snatched from that dead Raider), thick pads worn by the old baseball players (this was courtesy of a dead Diamond City guard), and a metal right-shoulder pad. He thought she looked funny inside her mismatched armor, with her two pretty, worried eyes barely visible from inside the dirty glass.

"So," he said, and stood with legs wide open at the head of the corridor, with his arm stretched out front, holding the automatic pipe pistol. "Let's do this!"

The girl pressed a key at the terminal's keyboard and crawled under the desk, just like he'd instructed her, face down, with her two hands around the rifle and her eye at the sights. The doors opened with a hiss and then an eerie silence. After a few torturing minutes, the first growls were heard, faint but terrifying, growing hungrier and louder and more numerous. Two creatures were the first to peep out wearily from the opened doors and two swift pulls of MacCready's trigger got them both shot at the head. The rest, however, rushed towards them manically and he couldn't aim straight. The girl shot one at the leg and slowed it down a bit.

Now three of them had fallen on and around him and he used the pistol's bayonet to push away their revolting mouths and the pointy yellow teeth, and their skeletal arms that were now reaching out frantically to tear his skin off. One of them bend over, or fell down wounded, he couldn't be sure, and grabbed him by the ankle, giving him a really good bite. MacCready gave a cry, kicked him away, and shot him. He managed to finish him off, but it was already late; he couldn't stand on his two feet. He made two steps back, staggered and fell all over the floor. He kicked a head with his army boot, with his good leg, while sticking the bayonet on another, just a breath away from his own face, a little before he started feeling the burning pain from a sneaky scratch on his ribs. More were coming. He had to reload.

He turned and took a glimpse at the girl. She also cried from pain when a hungry mouth bit her hand, but she, too, had a bayonet on that rifle and started thrusting it over and over again on that head that had intruded inside her little shelter, until she realized it was definitively and irreversibly dead. She turned and stole a furtive look at him, as she was lying flat like that, the glass of her helmet now raised up, probably to be able to see better, whatever little of her face was visible was flushed and sweaty, splattered with blood. The two ones who were left had been shot at the legs and approached them slowly, dragging their limbs on the floor with their nails. She was about to tell him something, made a faint move to reach him, but he yelled urgently: "Run and get the cure from the lab!" He still wasn't able to get up, but he'd be damned if he couldn't handle two crawling ferals. He loaded, shot, and then all went silent again. Around him were weird bodies, sprawled all over the floor. Three dead ones around the desk where the girl had hidden. 'She didn't do bad, not bad _at all_ ,' he thought with relief, for a second time since he met her. ' _We_ didn't do bad, still alive and all,' he corrected himself.

When he saw her emerging out of the lab at the other end of the corridor, her arm raised up so that he could see it too, the little vial with the greenish-blue liquid inside her hand, he felt an immense relief, a delight that could even lift the excruciating pain off his ankle. But it didn't last long. As the girl was approaching with quick steps and a smile on her face, he saw something moving in the dark corners of the lab behind her, a blue mass that gave off an fluorescent light. The mass unfolded and had two skinny arms and two scraggy legs and a head. 'But it glows, it glows, for fuck's sake…,' he thought and it really did, with a bright blue color; it could almost have been beautiful. The girl was now about 10 feet away from him, totally unaware of what was going on, when he, still stuck on the floor, waved his hand at her and his lips silently formed what he wanted to tell her. Her bewilderment lasted for one second only – she then took a step to the left and hid swiftly inside one of the empty rooms, crouched near the door frame and stared at him with bulging eyes.

The glowing creature was now standing at the lab door, looking straight at him. MacCready grabbed the sniper rifle he had hanging on his back and shot at it quickly, bullet went straight at its forehead. The creature staggered backwards but came back again at its original position, like rubber. 'What the… If this one doesn't die from a shot in the head like the rest of them, I'm really fucked,' he thought. He got ready to shoot again, but the creature had already started its frenzied run towards him, arms and legs moving uncontrollably and its mouth wide open. Second shot found it on its shoulder and delayed its course a little, only for a few seconds. In those seconds, MacCready thought that his life would finally end, inside that dark building, on that dirty floor, surrounded by dead ferals. Well – he didn't expect anything better. At least the failure of not saving his son wouldn't be added to the rest of his fuck-ups, so he could die in peace, without that burdening his mind. He could die as he had imagined himself die so many times in his dreams, inside the dark metro station, a most familiar death. He was ready.

And then, when just a few feet separated him from that glowing thing, he saw a thin hand coming out of its cover, he saw it throw what looked like a lunchbox with a sensor on it, wrapped underneath thick duct tape. The blast was deafening inside that closed space, Nuka Cola caps were thrust everywhere, ricocheted on his helmet and penetrated his clothes, got inside his skin on his legs and arms, and pieces of rotten, fluorescent blue meat flew all over the place.

The girl ran out of her hiding spot and came towards him, limping slightly on her right leg – a cap had gotten itself inside her knee. She crouched in front of him and was trying now to unbutton a pouch that was hanging from her belt in order to get a Stimpack she had inside, but her fingers were trembling and slippery from all the blood and she couldn't make it. He unclipped the strap that was holding his helmet in place with one hand, took it off, and threw it away on the floor. The girl came close to his face, staring at him from inside the glass of her helmet, examining him as if it was the first time she saw him and he was some kind of an alien form of life, something odd to look at. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back, a wide grin all over his face, and then started laughing quietly, a bit nervously, but certainly amusedly. He said:  
"Next time, make sure you drop that bottlecap mine a little farther away from me…"


	9. Chapter 9

When they dragged themselves tiredly outside 'Med-Tek Research', supporting each other awkwardly, and limping, it was pitch dark and the fog had spread everywhere. They started treading wearily on the destroyed asphalt until, quite some time and several breaks later, they reached an old suburb with a few houses that were still standing, and MacCready caught a glimpse of the double iron door of an underground bunker, behind a somewhat well preserved two-story townhouse. The door was locked shut with a padlock, which wasn't difficult to get rid of with a shot. The metal panels opened slowly, creaking, and with the Pip-Boy's faint light they saw a few steps leading down to a dark basement. They both climbed down carefully, Mac first and Nora behind him, lit two oil lamps they found after fumbling around a bit, and closed the heavy door behind them slowly, to avoid making a lot of noise.

The basement had a bunk bed with two mattresses, a radio on a small desk, a tall file cabinet, and a rusty rack on one corner with all sorts of tins, cans, water bottles, and RadAway solutions piled on its shelves. They looked at each other momentarily – they'd struck gold. They opened two tins of cram, pulled one mattress down on the floor, sat both on top, their backs against the small wooden desk, and started eating ravenously, with their hands, without talking. After a while they fell asleep, their bodies loosened up and bent over each other, and they looked like two dolls that a kid had thrown sloppily on the floor.

MacCready was the one to wake up first and he noticed that it had dawned outside from a faint ray of sunlight that came through the slight opening between the two door panels. His neck was stiff because he was all bent over Nora, whose head was resting on his stomach. She was still deeply asleep, with her mouth half-open. When he tried to slowly drag himself away from her, she murmured something and sat up abruptly, letting her head fall back against the desk, still asleep.

"You go to sleep now," he whispered, and rolled up the leg of her trousers with slow movements in order to wrap up her swollen knee, at the point where the caps had gotten her. She stirred and complained quietly in her sleep, but MacCready ignored her and steered his attention to her hand and started changing the bandage on this too, since the old one was all bloody and damp. When that business was over, he glanced at her, but quickly looked down again; he felt embarrassed that he'd brought her so close to her death. But she hadn't died – she was tougher and more inventive than he'd reckoned, and the thought brought a faint smile to his lips. He felt the need to thank her for helping him when no one else would, but he was never good with this sort of talk and didn't know what he could say or when, and how he should start. So instead, he let his head rest softly on her left leg, with his arms around her, and stayed like that, enjoying the quietness of the small shelter. He thought she was sleeping, but suddenly he felt her fingers running through his hair, very tenderly, as if she was stroking the hair of a child, and then he sat up and came really close to her, at the curve of her neck, still not looking at her, his lips almost touching her, and whispered 'thank you', very very quietly. He smelled her unwashed hair and the salt on her skin and felt glad that she was warm and alive and with him, just the two of them in the stillness of the basement, as if they were the only people left on earth. For a moment, he wished it too – to open the iron door and to be him and her alone, and the wasteland. They didn't need anyone else.

But now that he finally had her so close to him, he couldn't help himself, especially the way he was feeling the gentle pressure of her hand at the back of his neck and with that half-opened mouth of hers and her closed eyes, and he started feeling her face with his lips until he reached hers and the inside of her warm mouth. She opened her legs and let him come closer, in the opening they formed, and kept him there tightly, and he slid one hand inside her leather jacket and on the curve that formed inside her shirt.

Now the fabrics covering their skin were bothering them terribly and started taking off their layers of clothing, their own and each other's, until they were left naked, facing one another, noticing that they weren't so different anymore: they were both pale and scrawny and dirty, with bruises, cuts, and marks of varying colorations all along their bodies. They fell over each other hurriedly and hungrily, bumping and stumbling on different objects inside the small room – at one point they shook the file cabinet and an old pre-war camera almost fell on the girl's head. She giggled and he smiled and pulled her close and underneath him, on top of the mattress. Their bodies were tangled together, skin rubbing on skin along with their wounds, and it hurt, as much as it pleased them – but they didn't care.

When they were done, they stayed on the narrow mattress for a while, both breathless and sweaty, legs and arms spread open. They got up later on, opened two more tins, and then back to sleep once more.

MacCready was again the first to wake up, and he had absolutely no idea what time it was anymore – he'd totally lost sense of time. He found her curled up next to him, with her head on his chest, still naked. He cupped her cute little breast and wanted her again, so he lowered his hand and placed it between her legs, where, to his great satisfaction, she was already wet, as if she was communicating with him in her sleep. He grabbed her hungrily wanting to devour her, and his lips traced her body all the way down to her belly, kissing her warm, soft skin. And then he saw those marks that were so womanly and that he knew so very well, because he also had a woman once that had bore him a child, and he understood her pain. He lifted his head and looked at her – she'd turned her face on the side and her eyes were glistening. "If I had him with me, if we were in that pod together…," she mumbled through a sob and he came to her wet cheek and told her hoarsely, "Don't be silly, kid." He wanted to tell her more, to tell her that he also had a dry well inside him, and that blaming herself would only make that well drier and deeper, but he wasn't in a state where he could think clearly at that moment, so he just held her tightly and kissed her, where her heart was. She held his head close and stroke his hair and his cheek and wanted to say his name, the only name she knew, but after the first syllable, he whispered, with half-closed eyes, "R.J. – my name's R.J. …"

They stepped out of the bunker the next morning. Their bodies were sore from the fight and the lovemaking and a weird silence had fallen between them, as if the moment they put on their dirty clothes they changed, they became different from the two naked lovers of the basement. The girl was walking silently ahead, at a faster pace, still limping a bit but stepping on her foot a little more comfortably, lost in thought and with the rifle in both hands. He paced more quickly to catch up with her, hopping on one foot mostly because his ankle was killing him, grabbed her hand, pulled her in his arms, and kissed her. He didn't like her being away from him. Not now, that she was his.

Dusk had fallen when they finally arrived at Goodneighbor and MacCready strolled inside the place with a wide grin on his face, wanting to buy whiskey for everyone – if he could. He settled for taking the girl down to the Third Rail to celebrate with drinks. Few people were inside the bar and the air was stale and musty. Magnolia, the singer, was wearing a faded lamé dress and was sitting on a stool at the bar with her legs crossed and the usual glass in her hand. When he saw her, MacCready stepped quietly behind her and gave her a hug, before she had time to notice him, brushed a kiss on her cheek, and told her, "Hello beautiful."  
"Well, hello there, Mac – you gonna buy me a drink?"  
"For you, I'd do anything," he replied.

Now for MacCready, who had become a man on the dusty roads of the Wastes, this was the custom way to address a woman, any woman, and the Commonwealth women responded accordingly. He didn't talk to the girl like that because most of the time up until then he saw her as a child, and because she wasn't cut from the same cloth, she wasn't like any woman he'd ever known. Truth is, he often felt uncomfortable around her and didn't know what to say for small talk, everything he was used to saying seemed stupid to say to her, so he said nothing.

He ordered two beers and a whiskey and planted himself on a stool next to that old-style entertainer, while the girl was still standing a little further back. He turned to give her the beer and saw that she'd pulled a sour face, but didn't tell her anything. He asked Magnolia to sing another song and she told him with her low, husky voice, "Get off my back Mac, you know that I can't start singing before I take my medicine," and they laughed. He turned his head back again to tell Nora to sit next to him – he just couldn't figure her out at times – but he saw her at the back of the room, going up the stairs to the exit, just like that, without a word. She'd left her beer right next to him, on the bar. He didn't much like it, but was too happy at that moment to trouble his mind with her shenanigans. Still, he didn't much like it. He frowned and tried to think if he'd done something that bothered her, but he couldn't think of anything, so he concluded that she was either tired or was again under one of those depression spells of her – the girl had a special flair for drama.

Charlie, the robo-barman, floated towards him behind the bar, with his mechanical hand permanently stuck inside a glass that he wiped time and time again with the rotating cylinder that was his other hand, and told him:  
"You know mate, when a girl takes off like that, there's only one thing happening."  
"Oh yeah? And what's that?"  
"She wants you to follow her," he replied and headed to the other side of the bar. MacCready was certain that he would have also winked conspiratorially at him, if he had any eyes that is. 'Well, that's new; taking advice from a tin can…,' he thought irritably.

And he went on drinking the lukewarm beer, eyes down, elbows on the bar. MacCready wasn't used to running behind women and he certainly wasn't going to start that day. He thought that the girl had probably gone back to the hotel to lie down, where he would also go later on – and this time he wasn't going to sleep on that wretched sofa. This time, he was going to sleep next to her, and the thought of her warm body next to his produced a strange feeling in him, a kind of warmth that started in his chest and went up, to his head, making feel giddy. And come morning he'd sent the cure to the Wasteland with the caravans. He was happy alright, after a very long time.

When he finally stepped out, in the cold night, and went to Hotel Rexford, that old crone that was behind the reception desk told him that no, he couldn't go up to the usual room, because no one had paid for it, and that no, no girl had come by, adding dryly that if he wanted a room, it would cost 10 caps. Up front – Hotel Rexford didn't give no credit.

He went out on the filthy streets of Goodneighbor again, to look for her, but didn't find her anywhere.

* * *

Chapter's 'end-titles' music: Chinawoman - Good Times Don't Carry Over == .../watch?v=4kezlZGjO1I (copy-paste after YouTube's URL)

Just to let you know that it might be some time before I update because... I still haven't written chapters 10 and 11 (which will probably be the last) and so far I was just translating things that I had already written in my native language. But I promise I'll do my best to finish this story!  
Until then, I want to thank everyone for reading this so far...!  
I'll just leave a playlist here with songs that helped me write this (mostly sad ones, be warned), to keep you company until we meet again, in writing:  
[insert YouTube's URL here]/playlist?list=PLqnuBddCAljrfOiplnrb2N1jH5xMtXg74


	10. Chapter 10

"She's up," said Jim.  
"She's _trying_ to, Jim," said Marge.  
"Well! About time. Father is anxious to see her."  
"I don't know, Jim."  
"What do you mean you don't know, Marge?"  
"I mean, look at her."  
"I _am_ looking, Marge."  
"Jim. _Look_ at her. All these scratches, these bruises. The dirt, oh God, look at the dirt. Look at her fingernails, Jim! Her hair…. And that stink! God, she needs a good scrubbing. She looks like those filthy… How on earth do they call them up there? Scavs? Is it scavs?  
"I believe it is 'scavers', Marge," said Jim in his usual monotone.  
"Yes, yes, 'scavers', that's it. She looks like… _them._ Up there… I just don't understand what exactly Father wants to accomplish with this, I just don't know, Jim. She stayed on the surface far too long. She seems to be one of them now."  
"Well, life on the surface is tough. We all know that, Marge. But you're right; the girl did stay up there too long."  
"Don't call her 'girl', Jim. You might get used to it. She's the 'Sole Survivor', remember?" Marge said pompously.  
"Of course, my dear – although I believe that no one will reprimand me if I do."  
"The thing is, Jim – what troubles me, that is – that she stayed up so long that… What good will it do? How is his grandiose plan going to work, you know? I'm not entirely sure if there's any point in all these."  
"Keep it down, Marge. She's gonna hear you. She's waking up," Jim whispered.  
"Oh, come one, Jim, you and your precautions. So what if she hears us? We'll find a way to wipe…" Marge said dismissively, but she started whispering all the same.

Nora's eyes felt like weights, like they were made of lead. They fluttered a bit and then closed again. But it was her time to be up. Her consciousness was slowly sinking in and she began to feel her senses. She opened her eyes slowly and let the soft white light flood in and began becoming aware of what and who was around her.

She saw them stooped over her, like worried parents. The man, Jim, a balding thin guy in his fifties, a thin reassuring smile on his face. The woman, Marge, with smart, bright blue eyes, ever so curious, her alabaster face rimmed with fluffy tufts of auburn hair. She looked a little bit younger than Jim.

"Well, hello my dear," Marge was the first to greet her. "Don't you worry now, everything's all right." Her voice had shed the previous tone of disgust. She was real sweet now.

"How are you feeling?" said Jim. "If you can't feel your fingers and toes yet, don't worry. It's just the anesthesia wearing off. Everything will be fine in a minute."

'Anes… what?' Nora thought. "Where am I?" she said weakly.  
"You're safe," said the woman who was Marge, very reassuringly, very definitively.

She seemed to be sitting on a reclined white chair, inside a white room, surrounded by white furniture. 'So much white,' she thought. She was still dizzy and disoriented, and couldn't quite move her legs or arms. She couldn't remember where she was before either, or what she was doing. Something fuzzy was in her mind, something dark and unpleasant, but it was OK now. She was safe, Marge had said. She felt calm.

"Well, now that you're up, we'll leave you make yourself at home. There are clean clothes in the dresser beside you and a shower in the room behind. I'm Margaret Dawson, by the way, and this is my colleague, Jim Creaks. We're going to come back in a while, when you're ready and rested, to take you to Father."  
"To who? Where am I?" Nora asked again, a bit more lively now. Both the man and the woman were wearing white lab coats, so her first thought was that she was in a hospital, a normal one, like the ones that were around before the war.  
"All in due time, all in due time," said the man, who was Jim Creaks.

They stepped back, stood next to the white sliding door, looking at her smiling, as if they were looking at a patient in a mental hospital who won't take her pills, and took their leave. The sliding door closed softly behind them with a click, and locked. Though Nora never really bothered to check. She was too consumed with observing her white surroundings and wondering if the flowers in that brand new vase on the white dresser against the wall were real. When she was finally able to move her legs and arms, she found out that they were. 'Real flowers… after all this time.' The 'shower' that the redhead had mentioned was her next all-consuming thought. She walked carefully towards a small room at the back and she indeed found a bathroom there, in pristine condition: shiny toilet, shower, sink – hell, there even was paper! She took off her dirty clothes quickly and ran in the shower compartment to check if there was real water, too, or if all this was just an elaborate farce.

And the water did indeed come out and it was warm and fresh and purifying. After she had thoroughly removed the last traces of grime from her fingernails and scrubbed her skin a million times, Nora must have spent at least ten more minutes just standing there, doing nothing; just standing there, with a blank stare on her face, letting the hot water flow on her aching body. In the end, she stepped out only because she had to and she almost had to push herself to do so. Only after she donned her new clothes, which consisted of a clean white jumpsuit and clean white underwear, did she begin to really think, to really remember. She remembered the dark and misty Commonwealth, the constant heartbeat and the adrenaline. She also remembered the night at the basement and the man. Especially him. What the hell had happened to him? Then she remembered being pissed at something, him drinking at the bar and her going up the steps furiously, opening the heavy door, and breathing the stinking cold air of Goodneighbor outside. But nothing much afterwards. At that point her second thought was that all these, the irradiated Boston, the monsters, the men with metal on their chests, the bombs, the frozen Vault, the basement, the man with the feline eyes, Shaun sleeping in the cryopod - everything was a bad dream and she had now woken up. It was over.

Normally she would be starting to get upset, but the hot water and the drugs had made her strangely serene. She just reached out and let her hand travel on the smooth surface of the wall, which was a material she couldn't really define, something plastic-like and oddly soothing to touch: smooth and snowy-white.

A few moments later the sliding door opened again and Jim and Marge took her by the hand and walked her along seemingly endless white corridors until they reached another identical sliding door and then Marge said:

"Step inside; it's time to meet Father."

By that time the scenario in her mind had changed again; now she was almost convinced that she was kidnapped by a high-tech religious cult and that she was going to meet their high priest. Indeed, when she went inside the spacious oval room, she saw a white-haired old man sitting behind a round white desk, his attention shifting from a kind of futuristic monitor he was staring at to her, who was standing awkwardly near the closed door. He immediately stood up and motioned her to sit on a chair just across his, and he was smiling and calm. When Nora approached and could see him more clearly, she thought he evoked images of figures familiar and well liked, of a beloved grandfather or an uncle, for example or, in Nora's case at least, of a respected and wise college professor. He was wearing a white lab coat, like the ones that Jim and Marge were wearing, only his was unbuttoned, letting his bright green sweater be seen. Nora made him about 65 or 70 years old. His head was rimmed by thick white hair and his equally white beard was carefully and elegantly trimmed.

"I'm sure that you have a lot of questions, Eleonore," was the first thing he told her. His voice was deep and smooth, imposing. It was the voice of authority, which someone would find difficult to oppose to.

"Actually, I have to apologize on behalf of everyone here," he continued. "The way you were brought here was rude, barbaric, to say the least. You were administered an anesthetic, Eleonore, the effects of which have probably worn off by now. But you have to understand, there was no other way.

So – welcome to the Institute, then," he added, slightly triumphantly, and always smiling. "I am Aden Ashworth, also known as 'Father'."

Nora gulped. Was this the Institute then? The same Institute that women scared their children with in the Commonwealth? The same Institute that people in Diamond City and Goodneighbor blamed for various kidnappings? She had once heard a scraggy woman scold her dirty boy, holding him by the arm: "The Institute will get ya if ya don't behave, d'ya hear me?" she'd said. Nora had asked MacCready what the Institute was and he just shrugged and told her, "Just the boogeyman of the Commonwealth, a story to scare children and old women with. I've no idea. Whenever someone goes missing they're all like 'the Institute did it - the Institute this, the Institute that'; as if the poor bugger didn't go looking for it, not paying for his dose and ending up dead under a pile of garbage.

Look – I don't believe in fairy tales. I only believe in what I see with my eyes and touch with my hands. Don't think about it too much." That's what he'd said.

On the shiny white desk Nora noticed her Pip-Boy left on a corner, all soiled and scratched, a cacophony amidst all the white, all the cleanness.

"Aah… the Personal Information Processor. This pinnacle of 21st century technology. Of course you'll have it back – "  
"What happened to my other stuff? Where are my weapons?" she asked instinctively then and her words, so foreign to herself, took her aback as soon as she uttered them. This was the mercenary talking, the man. His teachings. The survivor. Or was it just her?  
"Well…," Father said uncomfortably. "We don't carry arms around here. You're quite safe though; no need to worry anymore, like you did in the Commonwealth."

He left his chair and went to the back of the room, stood against the large window that was covering almost the whole wall. He told her to come near him. She did, and what she saw beyond that glass window was devastating for her to look at, after all this time she'd spent looking at ruins, it almost made her sick and dizzy. She saw that they were standing at part of the wall of a huge tube and all around there were more windows and balconies and rooms, just like theirs, glass elevators going up and down, men and women in white jumpsuits walking along transparent air bridges. Underneath them, at the round bottom of the tube, she saw glassy floors with clean, sparkling water flowing underneath, small waterfalls next to staircases, short trees with bright green leaves.

"How far are we from the Commonwealth?" she asked him, and the white-haired old man pointed a finger up the great ceiling, which was a huge dome simulating the evening sky, stars and everything.  
"Thousands of feet under the ground," he told her.

It was the food really that made her stay. And the water. Every day, for the next few days, she would stuff herself with that brown paste they were using for food (they'd discovered that it was less costly, lasted longer, and it packed more nutrients than food in its regular form) until her stomach hurt, drank as much water as she could, had hot showers, and slept on the warm bed. The old man had revealed to her that they knew who she was – hence the name he'd chosen to call her – and where she was coming from. This kind of news was hard to pass unnoticed, even down there, under the ground, he'd told her. And because she was one of a kind, the only person with authentic knowledge of the past, he said that they needed her to guide and inform them, to educate them on a world long lost but likely to be regenerated again. Through them. A bunch of CIT scientists had started this underground facility, just before the bombs fell, and their legacy lived up to that day, a hundred times more developed, and more sophisticated. Their mission was to recreate a new world, on the foundations of the old one, and that's where her contribution would become indispensable. Sure, she'd help them, she'd thought. If this was the only thing that was needed from her to restore the world to its former state, it was certainly the least she could do. But it was mainly the food that kept her – and the water.

That was during the day. At night, when the dome got dark and the artificial stars lit up, her thoughts always went back to the man.

She would put 'Darin at the Copa' at the glossy, brand-new pickup in her room, lie on the soft bed, on top of the white, clean sheets, with one arm folded under her head, and reminisce about his rough touch on her skin that night at the basement. He had patched her hurt knee up with a piece of cloth and he had come close to her ear and whispered something to her – she wasn't able to make out what he'd told her. She felt giddy from the proximity between them and she just wanted to kiss him, and slid her fingers through his blond hair when he made love to her and caressed him. It was what it was: a man and a woman, together and alive. But it wasn't only this. She came to realize, now that she was finally lying on a soft bed and had time to think and she didn't have to hide or be hungry or scared, that the night at the basement was the culmination of all that she was feeling for the man, all those moments when she was peeking at him diligently cleaning his guns, all those seconds when she was prying into his fingers and his nose and his skin; hell, it was the culmination of that very first moment when she had seen him inside that filthy, dark metro station and he had given her that cocky, glassy look of the predator. 'Fuck it,' she'd think to herself; she might as well admit it now. She'd probably fallen for him the first time she saw him down there, and then rushed up the stairs to sell her wedding ring. She rushed to sell her marriage, not even three months after Nate's death – and for whom? For that boy with the rotten teeth, who'd gotten old before his time. She tried in vain to find a rational explanation for all those things she was feeling. She just ended up imagining that he was holding her in his arms, 'Dream Lover' came on at the pickup, and she fell asleep.

Sure, she felt bad for him; she felt bad thinking he was up there, perhaps looking for her, bad for leaving him like this, even though it wasn't really her fault. But then she would stubbornly think that it would serve him well for a few days. After all, she didn't really know what he felt for her, he was a stranger. They'd almost spent a month together but she'd learned his first name on their last day. He only talked in deals and bargains, he only gave when he'd already taken something. For him, she was just another 'thumb-sucker from the Vaults" – oh, he had spouted that line so many times that she'd lost count, usually accompanied by an anecdote of how useless they all were, and then he burst into laughter, probably implying how useless _she_ was; yes, he did laugh sometimes, on the road, when they were relatively fed and safe and weren't running from someone – or _something._ She wondered, was she just another woman in his collection of women, together with that singer with the red dress whom he never missed the chance to put his arms around and call 'beautiful', or together with that other woman, the one whose memory haunted him? That was what she was thinking when they finally crawled out of that basement and then, after a while, he had reached her, hopping on one foot because the other one was still hurting, and he grabbed her by the arm, firmly but not ungently, and he just told her, "Don't walk so far ahead of me; I like being close", with that cocky confidence he always had. And then she saw herself running up the steps of that filthy bar, pissed to the bone, 'if he wants to play around, let him play around', she'd thought. But now all these seemed so childish to her, so pointless, so pre-war.

By the fifth day, she was well fed and well rested, had started getting a bit more meat on her bones, but boy, if she didn't feel as listless and numb as ever. Her days were almost identical: she woke up, met with Marge and Jim at the Advanced Systems Department and answered their questions about the old world, then she had lunch, then she met with Clayton at Bioscience for medical tests, then back to Advanced Systems for 'brain scans' with the VPBA machines (one of which she had already tried at tested up at Goodneighbor's 'Memory Den'. Dr Doherty in Advanced Systems said it was actually stolen from that facility down there – who knows how). Then, when the artificial sun had set and the fake stars slowly emerged, she was back to bed, lost in her reveries. She was safe here, she'd been told. She could relax. Only she couldn't relax; it was too safe, too civilized. Too sterilized. She started feeling like the time when she was pregnant, back in their old Sanctuary apartment, listening to old Codsworth's jokes, having no control over anything. Well, wasn't that the sum of her whole life?

Now, at nights, she'd forgotten all about her silly, unspoken feud with the mercenary; now, when she was thinking about him, which she often would, she would only feel the desire inside her, swirling and writhing about in her chest, gnawing at her skin and bones, desperate to burst out, all bloody and wet and pumping. It was a desire she'd never felt before, certainly not for the man she slept with those quiet pre-war nights at Sanctuary, and in order to soothe it she could only dream and place her fingers in her wetter parts.

During the fake days – she wasn't even sure if they were keeping up with the real time down there - she would sometimes sit on a white bench, next to the small artificial waterfalls, and would stare at the dome that had turned light blue, and she'd think that on top of all these there was real dirt, whirling around by the air, cold and fresh, and pieces of the streets and rubble. And, somewhere up there, there was him as well. She envisioned a crack along the dome, everything torn apart like paper, and the sun coming into view, the real sun, and all the stones and the dirt and the ruins falling on their heads.

She started feeling that there was something odd going on inside those white plastic walls. To begin with, it was a sheer middleaged-ville down there: there were no children; no teenagers; no people her age. There was only this handful of scientists and the rest of them – well the rest of them sure looked young enough, but they weren't _real_. They were synthetic people. "They're robots, to use a word from your time, but highly advanced ones. Almost indistinguishable from humans," Father had told her, in one of their meetings. It was remarkable what the scientific community who had hidden themselves underground, like mole rats, had done all these years; really outstanding. They had managed to perfect pre-war A.I. technology to the point where they were actually now able to create artificial humans that weren't so different from real humans, at least in appearance. "They're still puppets, of course," Father had said, "with no conscience or free will." But they kept working fervently to advance them even further. Now those 'people' – 'synths' they were called, for short – were roaming around, all glossy and perfect, doing various odd jobs and praising Father. They were third generation synths, she'd been told, and they were the first to have human DNA. The DNA that was used was Aden Ashworth's – he was, indeed, their father.

And despite all the mind-blowing things she'd seen, Nora kept thinking of the toxic world she'd been taken from. She didn't feel she belonged down there. She didn't feel she belonged in the new Commonwealth either, but down there it was something different. Despite their outside politeness and old-world manners, she only got cold and calculating stares by those aging scientists, whereas up in the Commonwealth she'd receive admiration for what she was and how she looked. There was also a hint of jealousy and some kind of disdain by the women, whereas the men – well, there was something else in the men's eyes. There was that guy, in particular, Mort Hewitt he was called, head of Maintenance, who would didn't miss a chance to nudge or pat her on the shoulder every time he saw her. He'd given her a predatory look from the first moment he'd set eyes on her, when Jim and Marge was giving her the grand tour of the place, and since then he just wouldn't stop asking her if she wanted to come by and see his workplace, at certain rather inappropriate hours of the day. Mort Hewitt was the only uncoupled guy down there. Mort Hewitt was somewhat looked down upon by the rest of them, his rank and duties being rather lower, more plebeian, so to speak. Mort Hewitt was balding. Nora didn't know exactly what to tell him. Or, rather, she knew; she wanted to tell him to fuck off, but she – still – was too polite to do so.

One day, when she was having her lunch, which basically consisted of the brown paste for protein and a green mash for vegetables, she saw him. She couldn't really not notice him. He was sitting all alone at a further table in the corner and was the only one wearing normal clothes – Commonwealth clothes. A black leather jacket, torn at the elbows, and khaki combat trousers. There was a sheath for a combat knife attached on his belt. He had lost almost all his hair, except for a few greyish patches on his temples. He was eating his meal too, like everyone else, and when he finished he got up, leaving his tray on the table instead of returning it, like the others did. He headed towards the exit but then he noticed her, as she was sitting just across him, staring. He stopped and examined her from head to toe, with a lopsided smile on his face and a touch of appreciation in his eyes. He had a very deep cut along his face, starting at his left eye and going all the way down to his mouth.

"Soo… you must be the frozen dinner," he told her.  
"The.. what?" she said, choking on her bite.

He let out a raspy, loud laughter and went on.

"You're that broad from the frozen Vault, aren't you? How do I know? Well, aside from the fact that your mug is the only one worth looking, I was the one who brought you down here in the first place." His voice was deep and strong, and confident.  
"I see…"

He noisily pulled a chair near him and sat himself down, staring at her as if she was some sort of prize.

"So tell me, little girl, what do you think of this place?"  
"It's… fine, I guess."  
"Fine, you guess… And you ain't seen nothing yet."  
"I'm not gonna stay long – I'm going back to the Commonwealth in a day or two."

At that point, he burst into laughter. One of the scientists, who was having his lunch nearby, turned and looked at them angrily. The man placed his elbows on her table and lowered his head to come closer to her.

"And what makes you think that the old man will let go off you so easily?"  
"Why not? Doesn't he let you?"  
"Aah… But I'm different," he said smiling. He came even closer then, just a few inches away from her face, and whispered to her: "I'm the one who does their dirty work."  
"What kind of dirty work?"  
"Well, like the one involving you. Abducting folks." He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and a lighter and lit it right there, in the cafeteria. "Making folks disappear," he said with a wink.

The annoyed scientist picked up his tray and went away. At that hour there were only the two of them left in there. The second-generation synth who was managing the place approached them and told the man, "I'm sorry, sir, smoking is not allowed here." "Beat it," he said annoyed and got up. The robot just stood there, not knowing what more to say.

"So – good luck then, girly. I'm going upstairs to find myself some proper food – I've had it with this brown shit," he said, as if moving between the two worlds was the simplest thing. She got up hurriedly and reached out a hand, almost grabbed him by the arm.  
"Wait… How do you get out of here?"  
He gave her the look of a man who hears a stupid question.  
"Do you really think they want you to know how you get in and out? That's why they had me drag you senseless in here?"  
"At least… do you know where my stuff is? The weapons…"  
"Aah… _that's_ the right question. But you'll have to find this out yourself, won't you now?"

He gave her one last good stare from head to toe, his sarcastic smile still on, and then turned around and walked away. Nora stood next to the synth watching him go, while the smoke from his cigarette was whirling in circles up above his head. Later, when she stumbled on Jim along a corridor and asked him, he only told her that his name was Conrad Kellogg. "Freelance," he said.

That same day, late in the afternoon, she went upstairs to Father's apartments. She just barged into his office, unannounced and without an appointment, and found him conversing with Jim, Marge, Clayton, and one Asian woman scientist whose name she didn't remember.

"Well, hello, Eleonore. Can we help you with something? Is there any trouble?" Father said, very politely, very sweetly.  
"I… I'd like to go up now, if you don't mind. We could arrange for me to visit you later and help you out with any projects you're going through, or perhaps we can even meet on the Commonwealth when you start rebuilding - or whatever your plans are for reconstructing the world." She didn't make any introductions – she didn't want to make any either. Her heartbeat was elevated and her hand was slightly trembling because she wanted to see, she wanted to refute all those things that man Kellogg had told her. Father just stood there, staring at her with an incredulous look, while the others were either looking at him expectantly or at her. She thought she heard a choked laughter from the Asian woman.

"Well, now, Eleonore…," Father spoke at last. "What can I say?" He was grappling with finding the words. Here was a man who was clearly unable to fathom why anyone should want to leave the Institute. " _Why_ would you want to go to the surface, if I may ask? Is there some trouble? Can we do something for you?"  
"There's no trouble – it's just time for me to leave," she said abruptly. "We never said anything about me being held in here forever. Our agreement was for me to give you the necessary information until you manage to reconstruct the Commonwealth…"  
"Reconstruct… what?" Marge intervened.  
"Now, Eleonore – "  
"My name's Nora. I've told you before."  
"Umm, yes, Nora - well, I've never said anything about rebuilding the Commonwealth. This must have been a misunderstanding. You see, all of us here, we all work for a better future for humanity; a viable future. You've seen the wonders we've created over the years: and this is only the beginning. This place is large but it can expand, and necessarily so, since our population will grow…"

He kept on and on, eloquently describing their big plan for expanding and enhancing that tube they were living in, and now it was Nora's turn to stare at them all incredulously.

"You mean – you want me to believe that despite all the technological wonders you've created down here, you're not gonna help the people on the surface? That you're going to keep living underground? Is _this_ your grand scheme?" The tremble of her hand had gone up to her voice now.  
"The world on the surface is ruined; there's nothing for us to fix up there," Marge intervened again. "The ground and the water are still toxic, even after all these years, and the climate has changed dramatically. We've done tests, we know. And the people… Well, the people have certainly changed, too. You've seen it yourself. The people have returned to a semi-barbaric state; I mean it makes sense, considering the scarce resources…"  
"You're _wrong_!" Nora shouted at her. "The people grow the land, they're rebuilding, they…. they…." Now she was the one grappling with words. She wanted to tell her more about how she'd misjudged them, but images of Raiders kept coming to her mind, images of shooting and plundering, and irradiated water. Still, she had fond memories of the kindness random people had shown her, that Abernathy family in their farm, that girl in Diamond City who pretended to be a reporter, the man she travelled with - yes, that mercenary too, whose cold eyes were only a shell and if you broke it you could see how he _really_ was underneath: soft and scared and sad; a human, just a boy. But she wasn't able to tell her – them – all these; the horrors were too many.

"Things are bad, yes, but just look at all the achievements you've made! If you share just half of all these things with the people up there, if you teach them… Things will be better for everyone if you, if we, work together…"  
"Don't be a fool, my dear. The people on the surface don't _want_ to be helped; you think we haven't tried?" Marge said.  
" _How_? By abducting them?" The words were almost spat out of Nora's mouth, while she squinted to see that redhead for what she really was: a self-serving, arrogant old bitch. Beside her, Jim kept looking down at the floor.

At this point Marge raised her hands up in the air, looking at Father, and said, "Well, I give up. I told you that she stayed up for too long. You know what needs to be done." The old man put out a reassuring hand, turned to Nora, and said:  
"The world of the surface is dying; the future is here."  
"The _future_?" Nora exclaimed, disgusted almost. "All I can see here is a bunch of middle-aged scientists; where are those people who will supposedly populate this place? I mean the _real_ people, not those synthetic ones you've created, along with that mockery of a child. Speaking of which, where are the children? Where are the young people? What's _really_ going on in here?"

She saw all their faces turn away, avoiding her wild stare: so _that's_ what really hurt them then, she thought. The old man was still looking at her though, totally composed, measuring her silently, calculating the words he'd tell her.

"Well then, now that it has come to this, we might as well be more straightforward." His voice came out hard and strong and she almost felt her own trampled over and crushed into little pieces. "Our population here has been declining over the years, it's true. Children were scarce even in my years and now - now, we're all sterile. We can't have children anymore. It's a change in our DNA, an inevitable evolution. Human DNA changes over time, adapts to new conditions; it's something that cannot change.

However – and here's where your presence is invaluable – there's still room for _some_ change. You see, your DNA is untouched by the war; and you can bear children, we know that – "  
"Do you wanna keep me here so that I can _breed_ for you? Is that what this is all about?" she butted in, terrified.  
"Oh no, no, nothing of this sort. We're not brutes – we simply want to use your DNA for the Gen 4s, the fourth generation synths. Can you envision it, Eleonore? A generation of synthetic people that will not only have absolutely no difference from real people – better still! They'll be enhanced people. _This_ is going to be the future of humanity!"  
"Oh God, oh my God…" Nora whispered, covering her face with her hands. "You're all crazy…"

Father went on, unfazed. "You have to understand that you are – how can I put it? You're a precious investment for us. If we hadn't found you, well, we'd have to resort to Commonwealth people, but their DNA is already irreversibly altered, too. But we did find you and it's truly a miracle that you managed to survive so long, considering your circumstances. You're such a unique, such a rare find, Eleonore. We can't possibly risk losing you out there, at least not until the whole procedure has been completed, and all tests have been done. And, I believe, this is what you'd like yourself, isn't it? Living your life in safety, not worrying about how you'll survive, or about your future. You'll see, in time you'll get used to this place and all the wonderful things it has to offer. Just give it some more time – "  
Her eyes were moist and the first tear was about to burst out. "Oh, I've seen the 'wonderful things' this place has."

She'd seen, she knew what was under the surface. She'd seen that Doherty woman using the Virtual Projection machines at night, when no one was watching, to the point that she was always in a state of drowsy oblivion and her right hand was sometimes shaking uncontrollably. When someone asked her anything, she'd stammer and repeat words. Nora had asked her once if she was OK and she'd replied, "No, no, no, I'm very good, my dear. I'm good, good, good." She'd seen how, when her own sessions in those same machines ended, she felt as if a part of her brain had slipped away. How she felt that some of her memories had faded and she couldn't remember who she hanged out with in her school years or what hers and her sister's favorite game was. She'd seen how the artificial people had replaced their friends, their lovers, the children they couldn't have. She'd seen, she'd seen, from the thin door opening, that synth getting down, that beautiful blond synth girl getting down on her knees. It was Mort Hewitt's door but it didn't matter; it could have been any door. Oh, she'd seen enough.

Angry tears were now rolling down her cheeks and words were difficult to come out. "Eleonore, my dear, some more time is all that you need," Father kept saying.

She came near the big round table and banged her fist down so hard that the Asian woman next to her gave a small jump on her chair and a faint 'oh dear'.

"I told you – it's Nora!" And she walked out.

Back to her room, when she'd finally stopped shaking and crying uncontrollably, she stood looking at her reflection at the sparkling clean mirror in the bathroom. Still naïve, still stupid, she thought. 'Good luck, girly,' his sarcastic words came to her mind. She tried to remember what the mercenary had told her. "I had to come up with every trick in the book to survive the Capital Wasteland," he'd told her once. He'd explained what tricks these were in his random narratives of his adolescence and adulthood: lying, stealing, and deceiving, blackmailing and extorting. And killing, of course. 'So, crying isn't gonna help you, 'girly',' she told herself, looking at her wild stare in the mirror, almost resembling a different woman. She grabbed a glossy vase from the dresser behind and thrust it to the mirror like a madwoman. Both mirror and vase shattered into little pieces, with a terrible crash.

'I'm gonna fuck you up,' she thought aloud.

* * *

Chapter's 'end titles' song: Mogwai - Deesh == (.../watch?v=agI05dlKy2M (copy-paste after YOuTube's URL) (shame only the live version's on YouTube :/ it sounds OK I suppose)


	11. Chapter 11

When the lights were out in the Institute, she would roam around the smooth white walls when she had no sleep – and this happened often. This happened to her even when she was a girl, in her parents' house – how long was it since she had thought about that house? At nights, when her parents were sleeping and everything was quiet and still, and she couldn't sleep, she would sometimes tiptoe around the rooms, noticing how different they were under the blanket of darkness. The various objects (trinkets on the mantelpiece, random ornaments, a framed photograph with her and her sister, the wooden clock) seemed to be conspiring behind her back. She would tread past her parents' half-opened door, watching them sleep soundly inside their puffy bedsheets, her mother wearing her eye mask, her Daddy sometimes with his glasses still on and a book on his chest, breathing heavily, just on the verge of snoring. She would catch her sister on the phone with her boyfriend, intermittently lifting a finger to shush her and whispering sweet words, and then Nora would threaten to tell everything to their Mom when they fought and she didn't have her own way.

'Useless memories. The only ones you need are the ones where MacCready was showing you how to steal water bottles in Diamond City. The ones where you were crouching across the Commonwealth lest someone would kill you on the way, until your knees hurt.'

In those late-night wonderings of hers, she had found out that there was one light that was nearly always on and this was at Mrs. Doherty's premises, at Advanced Systems. She hadn't dared to go inside at first, to disturb a scientist of Mrs. Doherty's caliber, who surely must have had a good reason for staying up that late at night. After a while though, when boredom kicked in and she knew her way around more easily, she decided to go near the automatic sliding doors and step into the hall of the lab complex. There, inside the room with the VPBA machines, that she often visited in the mornings, she'd found Doherty lying inside one, a monitor close to her face and electrodes attached to her head. Her eyes were open but she was in a dream.

A second monitor nearby was projecting her brain activity. Nora had stepped closer to see what kind of memories this Doherty lady could possibly have of her dull existence inside that white tube they were all in. It was a person mainly, seen from within the misty images; a man. They were both inside the Institute, but this was a man Nora hadn't seen before. Doherty looked younger in the dream - and happier. Different images would ensue about her time with this stranger; a touch, an embrace, a kiss. Nora knew this wasn't Doherty's husband, so she assumed this was a lover. Or perhaps someone she'd met somehow in her youth but was no longer there. He was holding her head lovingly, begging her to do something, to come with him or help him somehow; Nora couldn't hear what he was telling her. Doherty was in tears, torn apart. A white door had opened then and two men (or synths, she couldn't tell) in hazmat suits came in. They grabbed the man's arms and dragged him outside the room. Young Doherty lied on the floor crying, sobbing.

At that point, the monitor had suddenly retracted from her face and the glass door of the lounger had opened slowly. Old Doherty was in tears, just like the young one in her dream. Nora had made two scared steps backwards, only to realize, a few seconds later, that the woman could not notice her; she was still too far lost inside her past, she looked devastated. Doherty had then staggered towards a cabinet, had opened a drawer, and had taken out a small cylindrical container. She had opened its cap with trembling hands, taken a bluish capsule, and swallowed it whole. This seemed to calm her down a bit and she had headed towards a medical bed nearby where she'd sunk into a stupor. She hadn't even blinked an eye towards Nora, who was standing behind watching her all that time. It could have been anyone inside that room – she just wouldn't care, she couldn't care.

Up on the surface, she would have been called a dream-machine junkie. Up on the surface, she wouldn't have had access to medicines and capsules to help her ease out her obsession; she would have ended up brain-damaged and dead. Nora hadn't seen it herself; MacCready had told her. And to think they had made her undergo sessions in those machines that messed your mind up; those bastards.

Now Nora was walking down the glassy stairs with careful steps until she reached the lab where the lights were eternally on. When she stepped inside, the memory machine was on and Doherty lying flat out on the lounger. Nora glanced at the monitor: it was the same dream, every night. At that point, the dream hadn't reached its tragic ending and it was still a happy time for young Doherty. Nora used the keyboard to manually exit the dream's images and selected the menu option 'Abort projection'. The message 'Session terminated manually' appeared on the screen and the glass door covering the lounger opened. Doherty had the bewildered face of a person who's crudely dragged out of bed.

"What… what… no, no, no…" Muddled monosyllable words were all she could say. When she finally registered the presence of Nora in the room, watching her, she said: "Who…? Nora… you're Nora, that girl, you…"

Matter-of-factly, Nora acknowledged her own identity and reached out an urgent hand to help the doctor out of the lounger. Doherty took the hand like an obeying child. She looked helpless; afraid and lost. Normally, Nora would take pity on her.

"You have a serious problem now, Mrs. Doherty, isn't that right?"  
"Pr… problem? No, no, no, everything's fine. Wh- why, why are you here?"  
"You don't have to lie to me. I know that you're staying up late here in the lab, Alison… is it Alison? Can I call you that?"  
"Ye…Yes, yes, yes, you can… but…"  
"And I know why. It's because you're addicted, isn't that so? You keep watching the same dream night after night, that memory with the man you used to love."  
"Oh… oh, oh, oh…" Dr Doherty went, sounding like a small wounded animal. She tried to drag her unsteady feet over to the cabinet at the back of the room and reached for the drawer where she kept her capsules with a thin trembling hand.  
"Don't bother. I've already taken all the pills and capsules you had stashed in there."  
"Wh... Why, why, why? What do you want…?"

Doherty had doubled over now, almost crouching on the cold white floor, tearful and weak, shaking and quivering like a leaf in the wind. Nora's words came out so cold and harsh she almost surprised herself.

"Don't worry, Alison. Listen to me. It's gonna be over soon and this is gonna be our little secret. I'm not gonna tell anyone – as long as you help me out, too."

She wasn't entirely sure whether the woman was actually listening to her, and that would be bad, that would render this whole charade useless, so she went down to her knees to come at her level, she pressed her hand upon her trembling shoulder, gently but steadily, and said to her:

"Alison. Listen to me. I need you to tell me something and all this will be over soon. When they brought me here – when they bring anyone here, where do they put their stuff? I had some weapons and some clothes with me; where are they now?"  
Doherty started turning her head left and right and sobbed, "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know…. Please…. It hurts… My mind… Please, please give me the capsules back… You don't know, you don't understand…"  
"Oh I know, I understand all right," her tone became harder and her fingers were shoved into the woman's flesh more intensely, probably hurting her. "You think you're the only one who has lost someone? Stuck inside here, in this golden cage, crying over ghosts. They took him from you and you did _nothing_."

The woman was sobbing uncontrollably now, her face covered by her skinny hands, her head still shaking 'no'. Nora pressed on her shoulder even harder.

"Don't tell me you don't know; I don't believe you. You must know, you _have_ to know something. I'll say it one more time: _where_ do they keep my weapons?"

A weak mutter escaped her quivering lips.

"What? Speak up, I can't hear you!"  
"They… they're… They should be at Facilities…"  
" _Where_ at Facilities? Concentrate!"  
"The… There's a storage room right next to Allie's office… That's where they keep the stuff from the outsiders, yes, yes, yes…"

That was her first victory and she let her grip on the woman loosen up a bit. But she kept on.

"Very good. And now, for the million-dollar question: _how_ can I get out of here?" And she stressed every single syllable of this.  
"I can't, I can't…," the woman across her sobbed, "… can't tell you this… no, no, no… Oh God, it hurts… please…"

Nora suddenly grew impatient with the woman's stubbornness, even in the state she was in. 'Secrets,' she said to herself. She grabbed the woman's chin and thrust her face towards her own, so that she could look her in the eye. If nothing else, words would help her now, she thought. 'You used to be a law student, for fuck's sake.'

"Listen to me, Alison. Here's your chance. Not with the ghosts you're dreaming about over there; not with that man who's no longer with you – whom you _betrayed_. Yes, look at me, don't fucking turn around! I'm _real,_ Alison; _I_ am the real thing, not whatever's in your head." Her own voice started to break. She suddenly caught herself holding the woman's head between her hands, just like she remembered the man was holding her just before he was taken away. "So here's your chance, Alison. Don't betray me – don't betray me too. I'm _begging_ you…"

Hot tears were rolling on the older woman's tired face as her hands were in vain trying to set herself free from Nora's clasp. The man's face was too close, the image was burning her and there was no release.

She muttered something incomprehensible and Nora went, "Main? Main what?"  
"M-m-m..maintenance ducts… that's - that's the only way out of here for you…"  
"How do I get there? Is there a code? A password? Tell me, Alison, please!"  
"The head…. you – you need Mort Hewitt to o-o-open the door to the ducts…. you – you need him…"  
"I need his card? Is that what you mean?"  
"No…" Doherty sobbed. "Door opens with his fingerprint…"

'Door opens with Mort Hewitt's fingerprint.' She silently repeated to herself. 'Door opens with Mort-fucking-weirdo Hewitt's fingerprint.' She would have laughed hysterically, were she not in Alison Doherty's lab, past midnight, with Doherty herself collapsed on the white floor, convulsing with cerebral pain and mental agony. 'Of all people… Maybe I should consider myself lucky after all.'

Now she stood up tall, reached inside her Institute jumper's pocket, took one of them bluish capsules, and threw it towards the doctor's direction. She would later return the rest of them inside Doherty's drawer, where she'd originally found them, bar one – who knows, she might need the good doctor's help once more. Coldly she turned and looked as the distraught middle-aged woman galped down the medicine. Only once did she throw a furtive glance towards Nora, like a hurt animal; still, Nora thought, still, there might have been something else in those red, puffed eyes of hers except fear and exhaustion - there might have been hope; there might have even been - could it have been? – redemption.

If someone had looked at Nora's eyes, however, they would have found something else. She didn't have time for pity now, nor did she have time for compassion. For a brief moment, she thought of herself as the foolish child she'd been whilst up on the surface and how the mercenary had scolded her for it. 'He was right,' she thought to herself, 'he was right all along. There was no time.'

With swift steps, she reached the sliding door to her little apartment and she found the synth sitting on the white armchair, reading a pre-war book. He never slept; he didn't need to.

"Nora – you're back," he said, with feigned human anticipation.  
"Hey there, Henry," Nora greeted him unsmiling, walking past him quickly and trying to unzip her jumpsuit at the same time.  
"You know, this is a pretty interesting book; to think that one race used to oppress another so much. They call them savages and use them as slaves; couldn't the white people just help them and work together? I don't seem to understand."

Nora was sliding one shoulder out of the jumpsuit at the time and turned around and looked at him puzzled. He looked so pretty, he was so pleasant to look at. His real 'name' was H2-56, but Nora had decided to call him Henry: in an odd way, it sounded mocking enough to her, but, at the same time, not offensive to the others. Every time she laid eyes on him, she couldn't help but notice his teeth, which were pearly white and perfectly arranged. She felt strangely disappointed at that; 'they aren't human,' she thought, but what she really meant was that they weren't black and rotten. They weren't the man's teeth.

He was Father's idea – "to keep you company," he'd said. At first she thought he'd sent him to spy on her, but she quickly realized he was just a servant – to whatever needs she had. If she told him to go down in the waterfalls and stand in the water on one leg, he would. She'd given him a book instead, to get him out of her way. He was beautiful all right, but it was an unearthly beauty, alien to humans, almost scary. In the end, she found it empty and repulsive. She longed for that cracked skin, chafed from the cold and the sun, the dirty fingernails, the matted hair. Imperfection was what made humans beautiful. The suffering. But the scientists had forgotten all that; they'd been isolated from the real world for far too long.

She stood looking at her reflection at the – repaired – mirror. She had grown plumper during her stay there, her cheeks had become fuller and rosy, and her hair was glowing with health. In brief, she wasn't too bad to look at. 'Can you do it?' she thought to herself. She dismissed the thought quickly. She _had_ to do it, there was nothing else to do.

"I don't know," she said, in reply to the synth's philosophical queries on mankind, "I'm going to sleep." She threw the jumpsuit on a chair and switched off the lights.

A couple days later, she found herself outside Mort Hewitt's office. She'd let her long hair down and had slightly bitten her lips and pinched her cheeks to make them redder. She'd also had the combat knife inside her boot. She had found all her belongings in the Facilities storage area, after she'd stolen Allie Filmore's personal swipe card and got inside; everything was dumped inside a white plastic box labeled 'S-83', whatever this could mean. Her sniper rifle, her auto 10mm pistol, her dirty, tattered trench coat, and her muddy boots – and the rusty knife of course. She did realize, however, that getting out of the storeroom with a rifle hanged up her back wasn't such a good idea, so she settled for the good old combat knife; it had to do.

Stealing the card from Filmore had proven to be an easier job than she'd expected. Being robbed of something wasn't a notion that Allie Filmore was familiar with, or anyone else down there for that matter. And it was MacCready's laughter in her ears all over again. "Thumbsuckers." She'd actually used one of the old pickpocket tricks he'd taught her back in the Commonwealth. "Watch and learn," he'd told her one day at Diamond City.  
"What are you going to do?" she'd asked.  
"Well… Let's say I'm gonna earn us a few extra caps," he'd said, a cunning smile on his face that made him look like a brat.

His grift was rather simple; it consisted of finding a Commonwealth guy or gal somewhere quiet with few or no other people around, and pretending to absent-mindedly trip over them, usually holding a newspaper or some kind of material that could spread all over the ground. At the exact moment the two bodies collided, with papers floating in the air or some kind of liquid spilled on the poor victim, he would quickly slip a few fingers in a loose pocket or purse and would snitch something; there was bound to be something. He didn't dare to pull this trick in Goodneighbor; folk too savvy there for these kinds of tricks, he'd said.

So he did it once, to show her, over at Diamond City, which wasn't the safest place to pull this kind of stand, but he did it anyway; he was 'getting rusty', he'd said. He used her issue of the local newspaper, 'Publick Occurrences' it was called, and he almost threw a man in an old khaki parka on the ground had he not steadied himself at the last moment, his paper and MacCready's paper all over the ground, scattered by the gentle wind. A guard came by, guided by the commotion, 'cause the man started yelling and cursing at them, and told them both to scat, "Take your fucking mercenary and get out of my sight!" he'd said, and they left the stadium city quickly, and MacCready showed her, after they'd left the great green walls well behind them, fifteen caps in his hand, inside a small pouch. He kept laughing to himself all the way back. "Watch and learn."

And she _had_ watched and learned, and now the knife was well tucked inside her shiny white boot and herself was standing outside Mort Hewitt's office, ready to step in. She wasn't planning to stab him or anything like that, of course; her plan was to lure him to the maintenance room and 'persuade' him to open the entrance to the ducts under the threat of the knife. She'd figured that it would be easy to scare those spineless scientists. She'd reckoned that the sight of a weapon alone would be enough to induce Mort to shit his pants and do whatever she wanted him to do, without her needing to actually resort to violence, which she wanted to avoid anyway. That's what she'd figured.

But first, she had to direct him somehow to the place itself. She took a deep breath in, puffed her chest out, and went past the sliding doors and into the office. Hewitt was alone, sitting on his desk and doing some kind of paperwork. When he lifted his head and saw her, he stared with an innocent surprise; Nora felt a sting of pity, but it didn't last long. It went away as soon as the gaze of the man changed and a sly smile appeared on his face.

"To what do I owe this honor?" he said, getting up.  
"Umm…" Nora went, coyly. "I think yours is the only department I haven't visited yet, so I decided…" She grabbed a lock from her hair and started twisting it with her fingers, tilting her head slightly.  
"I heard that you've visited Allie in Facilities, is that right? We're only a sub-division – so, you see, technically you have already visited _my_ department, as you put it." He laughed. His accent had a hint of the old-world Southern speech and Nora wondered how on earth he'd gotten it. She also wondered if there was any particular reason he was playing hard-to-get on _that_ specific occasion.  
"Well, yeah, _technically_ you're right, but… After all, you've invited me here so many times…"  
He went around his desk and came to stand opposite her, casually placing his hands at the desk's top behind him. He was still smiling.  
"That I did, that I did. But you kept refusing every time, so I thought to myself - I thought, 'This girl – There's no way this girl will ever come visit.' And now here you are."  
"Here I am!" She giggled. "You're right, of course, I did say 'no' every time, but well, um…" She took a step closer to him. She kept twisting that lock of hair. She leaned towards him and whispered conspiratorially: "Truth is, I'm bored out of my mind here. And... I was wondering…" She came even closer. Now only a breath separated her body from that of the man across her. She leaned a bit more and came close to his ear. "I was wondering if – you know, being the time the departments close and all – if you wanted to have a chat somewhere quiet, you know…"  
Mort leaned slightly backwards as if trying to avoid her. He gave her a cold look with those washed-out blue eyes of his and said, "Is that so? Have you anywhere in particular in mind?"  
"Dunno... Have _you_?"  
"Well, we can always go up to my place and have a drink…"  
"Hmm... nah, I don't want the others to see that. Is there some place else? One of the places you said you wanted to show me?"  
He laughed. "Well, I didn't know we had something to _hide_ from the others."  
"It's just that... It's just that I've seen everything in this place. What about the maintenance room? Isn't it where you work some of the time? That must be a pretty quiet place," she said.  
"The _maintenance room_?" he guffawed and almost choked. "What on earth do you want to see _that_ for?"

At that, she took two steps back, folded her arms across the chest, and pouted.

"Well, Mr. Hewitt," she said in a tone of feigned reprimand. "As you said yourself, I've finally decided to come visit _you_ , wanted to spend some time with _you_ in particular, and now it seems that it's you who don't want to spend time with me."

If, in some magical way, she could elevate from her own body and see this whole thing as a scene on a play, she wouldn't be able to recognize herself. That girl standing across that man, playing with her hair; that girl wasn't her. It was someone else, someone she didn't know existed.

"I didn't say that I don't want us to spend time together – I just thought the place was… somewhat strange," he went on, still smiling a sly smile.  
"Indulge me," she said, with a meaningful look in her eyes.  
He paused a little and stared at her, and she couldn't really figure out what that man was thinking, but after a few seconds he said, "Well, ooookay then - let me just grab my card, I think I've placed it here somewhere…" and he shuffled through the papers on the desk.

So down white stairs they went and through white corridors, until they reached a door identical to all the others in the place, except that this one had a label reading 'Maintenance'. Hewitt swiped his card to enter and, once they were inside, he swiped back to lock. "For some privacy," he turned and told her, with that fake smile of his. 'All the better,' Nora thought.

It was a semi-lit room with grey walls, the only place Nora had seen so far that wasn't radiating white. There was a big grey column in the middle, starting from the floor and going up to the low ceiling, and around it a long console with monitors and bright, flashing buttons, and all. Against a wall, there lay a metallic table with tools on it and underneath it there was a metallic bucket. Nora's eyes searched quickly through the room for some kind of passage and after a few seconds she found it; there was a small blue door at the opposite right corner of the room with a small panel next to it, attached to the wall.

She realized just then that her combat knife was still tucked tightly inside her right boot and cursed herself silently for not having already put it somewhere from where she could draw it swiftly and inconspicuously.

"Where does that blue door lead to?" she turned around and asked the man, who was just standing there, in the middle of the room, examining her. She was near the metallic table, pretending to be looking at the tools.  
"Oh that? Well, this one leads to the ducts. Don't tell me _that's_ where you want us to go now."

She laughed a strained laugh and this time he was the one who came closer to her.

"Well, Ms. Andrews, this is a place where I can often be found: the dark and mysterious world of Mr. Hewitt that you so eagerly wanted to see. Impressed?"

She didn't answer. Instead, she smiled and placed her hands on his chest. She reached closer and brought her lips close to his in an effort to kiss him. She expected him to go along; instead, he grabbed her by both arms and pushed her a few inches away, giving her a mocking glance.

"And what _is_ this exactly, Ms. Andrews?" he asked.  
"Ah… I… I just wanted… a _real_ man. I've had it with the synthetic ones," she said and she immediately thought that she couldn't have possibly chosen a cheesier line to tell him. He was still smiling his cool smile. He relaxed his clutch and brought her close to him again, and started kissing her some tepid kisses she imagined they could only come from a middle-aged, balding guy's lips, and all the while she was trying to lift her right leg and grab the knife.

But suddenly he stopped. He pushed her away and violently he turned her around and thrust her on the metallic table, throwing the weight of his body on her. He might have been middle-aged and balding, but he was still an able-bodied man and a lot stronger than her. And certainly not as spineless as she had imagined. Nora felt the cold metal being pushed against her belly and her crotch, she felt one hand grabbing her by her throat and pulling her head back, while the other nailed her left hand on the table. In vain did she try to hold on to something with her right hand, which was still free.

"You really thought I'd fall for this, didn't you?" He drew her head back even more and whispered in her ear. He chuckled. "But let me tell you, _dear,_ it was rather ill-thought, don't you think? Coming to my door out of the blue, uninvited, supposedly wanting to spend time with _me_ of all people, in… the _maintenance room_!" Now he was laughing. "You think I haven't figured out your little plan? Oh, but _anyone_ would! Tell anyone in here about the maintenance ducts and they'll know you're planning to escape."

The pressure of the man's weight was insufferable. But it was also the relentless weight of the fear that was crushing her. She wanted to scream, but she gagged instead, and felt she was losing her breath. Her natural instinct to push back and resist made him tighten his clutch even more, so she decided, just like an animal captured in the claws of a predator, to stand very still. The fear was too strong, debilitating. It was nothing like the fear she'd felt in the Commonwealth, because back there she was always on the run, but never caught.

"More importantly," he raised his voice and then immediately lowered it to a nasty hiss, "you think I can't tell if a woman despises me?"

'That's it; it's all over,' Nora thought and then, 'no, no, it can't be, not like this… .' She gradually felt her senses abandoning her, the pressure on her stomach, the violent force of the man's weight behind her, the tight clasp on her throat, choking her. He kept on talking to her ear, but she could no longer hear the words. Suddenly, her heartbeat slowed down and her mind emptied of all thoughts. A strange calmness took over her and a single image came to her mind out of the blankness.

It was MacCready and her on an empty, fragmented road. MacCready came behind her, putting one arm in front of her throat, in a firm, but not too tight, embrace. They hadn't become so familiar with each other yet, and she'd felt all her blood rushing up to her head as soon as he put his other arm round her waist.

"Let me show you what to do if someone tries to choke you from behind," he said. "You see when someone grabs you like that," and he tightened his grip on her throat, "most people's instinct is to fight with their hands and torso." He laughed. "But, see, this is useless, because that guy holds you tight and you can't move. So, what do you do, huh?"  
"What?"  
"Never forget the legs, kid! You make a step like this, here, and kick them in the shin; as soon as they loosen their grip, poof, you're free."

And now the man's voice was back to her ears again: "… and you know, I think you're right. I've had enough with the synths, too; they're too obedient. I'd like someone who will resist…"

Now her senses came flooding back, along with something else. She felt it – no, she heard it really – moving inside her, like the cogs of a machine which is put in motion, screeching and groaning. She felt the fear being caught inside the wheels of that machine, being crushed and torn into a million pieces.

There wasn't much space for her legs to move, still, she pushed herself to raise one knee and gave a good thrust at the man's leg behind her. It took him aback and the pressure sank. Her left shoulder felt free and she stroke a back blow with her elbow and broke the man's nose. Hewitt staggered backwards a few steps holding his bloodied nose with both hands. He grunted. Nora turned swiftly and pulled out the knife from her boot like tearing away her skin. She jumped forward and thrust the knife into the man's heart and then thrust it again and again and again, until his body was spread out on the floor, lifeless. She looked at him for a few moments. Later on in her life, when the memories of those dark times would come back to her, she realized that she didn't feel scared or shocked, neither pity or regret, like when she had had her first kills up on the Commonwealth. She only felt joy; angry, sweet, animalistic bliss.

But at that moment, there was no time to register feelings. She grabbed the dead man by the shoulders and started pulling the body towards the door leading to the ducts. It must have taken her about ten minutes to reach the other side of the room where the fingerprint recognition panel was placed. He was a broad man and now that his body was totally loose, he was even heavier for her girly arms. When she finally reached the door, she collapsed next to him, panting. She got up and tried to lift his right arm so that his index finger could reach the panel, but she couldn't manage; the panel was too high up the wall, she couldn't possibly lift the body up there. She just stood there, stooped over the corpse, her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. She drew the knife out again, got down to her knees.

When all was done, the finger did its job. The blue door opened with a clunk and she got into the ducts. It was basically one big narrow tube, dark and moist, going up to an indiscernible height. A metallic staircase was attached to the wall leading upwards. Nora started climbing up and every hundred steps she climbed she had the impression that the tube's walls were closing in towards her. It was an endless ascend. She would occasionally stop to catch her breath and went back to it. There was no turning back, no looking down. At certain points she couldn't feel her arms anymore and she thought her slippery, wet hands would betray her. At certain points she felt like crying, like screaming; she felt like letting her grip loose and dying. 'Not yet.'

The thought of the old man looking for her came to her mind and she found it extremely satisfying. The thought of all of them down there looking for that girl who would be their savior and, finally, when they'd managed to interrogate good doctor Doherty, when they'd managed to open the maintenance door which was locked with Mort Hewitt's personal card, the thought of them all looking at a rotting corpse with a severed finger – exceedingly amusing. All those old farts would be eventually dead, childless, she thought, and then only the synths would be left there, not knowing what to do with themselves. And Kellogg, that arrogant fuck.

When she could finally make out the top end of the tube, a small round lid of some kind, the blackened walls had narrowed so close around her that there was barely any space for her to move. She imagined the lid opening and Kellogg trying to climb down; and then she would tell him, "Hey mate, there's no room for both of us here and I sure ain't climbing all the way down for you." She laughed to herself deliriously. Obviously, there must have been another way for him to come in and out, some sort of passage inaccessible to her.

There was a handle on the lid, which hadn't been used for a very long time from the looks of it and it was stuck. She pulled and pulled with every ounce of strength that was left in her and eventually the lid unlatched with a rusty groan. She climbed outside and crawled on hands and knees on dirt. Above her, a clear Commonwealth night sky. Behind her, an imposing building with columns; she recognized the old CIT ruins.

She fell on her back against the soil, dirtying her white jumpsuit, and started laughing hysterically at the absurdity of the whole thing. Here she was lying, next to a humble, rusty sewer lid; which also happened to be the entrance to the shady Institute – big mystery solved. She breathed the cool air and took handfuls of soil in her hands. And there was just one thought in her mind, playing on a loop: 'No more fathers; no more fathers.'

Eventually, she reached Goodneighbor in the small hours of the morning. She was dead beat and felt like collapsing on the dirty road and never getting up again, but she had to carry on, just a little bit longer. She staggered down the stairs to the Third Rail, which was totally empty at that time of the day and drenched in darkness, except for a flickering light coming from MacCready's room; the room where she'd first met him. She went in and there he was, sleeping, spread out on the sofa, assorted empty liquor bottles next to him and around the room. He was unshaved and looked gaunt. 'In a general state of disrepair,' she thought, 'but still beautiful.' She sat quietly down at the edge of the sofa and softly placed her hand on his leg. It took him a while to open his eyes to her touch and sat upright, startled; normally, in the good days, he would wake up the moment she'd stepped inside the room. He stood there staring incredulously at her figure, like seeing an otherworldly apparition, and then placed both his hands around her face, as if to make sure she was real and not one of his liquor dreams.

"You looked so different then," he told her once, referring to that particular reunion.  
"Well, I was fatter," she told him jokingly.  
"No, not that. Your eyes – your eyes were different."

* * *

Chapter's 'end titles' song == Caribou - Back Home (type YouTube's URL and add .../watch?v=k7j6DyVcHRM)


	12. Chapter 12: Epilogue

She woke up from the soft, early afternoon sunlight that touched her skin entering through the small cracks of the wooden wall. She had to get up; there were things still to be done around the small farm while there was still light out. Reluctantly, she put on a checkered shirt over her tank top and went to light up the stove to make a hot tea. First things first.

It was all very quiet in the empty house and only the creaks of the wood could be heard. The setting sun's light that stealthily entered the shack from the various cracks and openings got intermingled with the floating dust particles, forming a miniscule mist that enveloped the different objects in a dream. She sat on the table and looked around, looked at the various mementos from her previous life that were arranged on the wooden shelves. Suddenly, she found herself yearning for a cigarette, but she hadn't seen any for… how long? It must have been at least five years. Her loyal Pip-Boy was lying at one corner of the shelf with a thick layer of grey dust on top of its once green monitor. A bullet had gone through it when they were travelling back from the Capital Wasteland and it had sacrificed itself to save her wrist joint from being shattered. She'd never managed to fix it. Next to it, there was the worn out military cap with the bullets inside the ribbon; well, there used to be some bullets, now there was none. The tan duster was hanging from a peg on the wall, along with the bandolier.

Nora got up from the chair and came closer to that shelf of memories. She picked up the little wooden soldier and blew the dust off. She put it back next to the cap. The small dust mist inside the shack had gotten a crimson red color now. She had to hurry up, there was little time.

But she didn't want to go. She stood there transfixed, contemplating on images of a time long gone. 'All of this will be gone too,' she thought, 'ashes in the wind.' Lost in a big nothingness, everything that constituted her life, herself too, blown to non-existence. The cracked and grassy roads would crumble to dust, the shantytowns would collapse, and those settlements that vainly took pride in their size and power would vanish in fire. The dark underground bar with the VIP room, the coastal abandoned diners, the half-burnt comic books, the ravenous dogs, Dogmeat, her former house in Sanctuary, Sean's crib, Codsworth, Hotel Rexford, the torn couch with the springs sticking out, the dust, the frozen Vault, the green military cap, her trench coat, the irradiated water, the sniper rifle, the Nuka Cola bottles, the bottlecaps, the white corridors under the earth. The empty bunker, that dirty mattress, the camera that fell on her head. The laughter, their laughter. The kiss. His breath on her neck. MacCready trying to stitch her up. Everything. What were all these but ashes? Glowing embers of a dying world.

The sun was setting now. There was no time. She went back to sit on the chair.

And then, the wooden door opened with a bang and two red-faced boys rushed in. The little one entered first, the one with the brown hair and eyes, and then the older one, who was blonde and blue-eyed and lean and tall.

"Mommy, mommy, look what Daddy caught!" said the little one who was almost breathless from all the running and rushed into her arms.  
"What? What did he catch?" said Nora smiling.  
"Hey, could you lift your pretty ass from that chair and help me out here?" said the man, who came in last, panting, with a dead radstag doe on his shoulders.  
"Aw, _come on_ Dad!" said the older boy. The man bit his lip and Nora glared at him, but she was still smiling.  
"Always a romantic…" she said and helped him dump the animal's carcass on the kitchen table.  
"You know me…" he said with a lopsided smile and gave her a kiss. She straightened the eyepatch that was covering his right eye. He took off his cowboy hat and threw it on a bed nearby.  
"Phew, I'm beat," he said. He then suddenly turned to the dusty shelf and asked, "Why are you still keeping this old stuff here? I'll never understand… I'm not planning on wearing this old hat any time soon, that's for sure."  
"I like looking at them. Now, why did you bring this thing in here? We have to carry it outside again."  
"I know, but Johnny wanted you to see it. Duncan, come on man, help me take this outside. And get the knife."

And then the man and the two boys hurried excitedly out of the shack and she was left alone to prepare things for dinner. He was right; why did she keep those old things on that shelf? But she couldn't bring herself to get rid of them. The image of the burning embers passed from her mind again, only to be interrupted by the boys' joyous shouts and laughter outside.

Sure, all these would eventually turn into grey ashes. But it hadn't come to this yet. Not yet.

* * *

Chapter's "end titles" song == Nomak - Ultimate Eternity (YouTube URL + .../watch?v=yFWG3wzTXEw)

Now that's _finally_ over, I'd like to thank you all for reading this and for your support. It means everything! :)


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